The Grouchy Editor

by Dorothy Cannell

What a bloody mess.  Cannell adopts a 1930s, Agatha Christie-like style for her debut novel, which is a pleasant enough mystery for about two-thirds of its length.  But then the author loses all sense of reality.

The heroine-narrator, an interior decorator obsessed with food, utters howler after howler (“I desired a roast beef sandwich with horse-radish and pickled onions with a wanton savagery that I had never felt for any man”), and her romance with an oddball male escort almost – but not quite – plunges the book into “so bad it’s good” territory:

Ben:  “This is how it could have been if only I had confessed my love before you went and got so skinny.”

Ellie:  “Part of me will always hunger for the wrong foods but I have to tell you that I am not prepared to eat myself back to my old proportions so you can prove the integrity of your love.”

The biggest head-scratcher of all is that, somehow, this amateurish junk food was included by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of its “100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century.”

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Suetonius

Complain all you want about our current leaders, but their flaws are chicken feed compared to those of the power-crazed, toga-clad rulers of ancient Rome.  For proof, we have this series of short biographies of the Roman emperors, written by someone who was actually there, the Roman scholar Suetonius.

As I read, I would sometimes begin to cut a given ruler some slack, deciding that – at least compared to the others – he wasn’t so bad.  And then I’d learn that he tortured and executed some unfortunate peasant for a trivial offense.  And that he helped himself to a senator’s comely wife.  And that he did worse.  Much, much worse.

But I’ll give the emperors this:  They didn’t discriminate with their atrocities.  Most of them were apparently bisexual, using men, women, relatives, and children as sex toys, and they were just as likely to decapitate a general as a fruit seller.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Janet Evanovich

I’m not sure who’s more foolish, Stephanie Plum or me, because I continue to read this silly series.  Eighteen is more of the same-old slapstick, but what’s new is that, for some inexplicable reason, Evanovich has made her plot ridiculously complex.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Dan Ariely

In all honesty, this book was a letdown.  The human propensity for lying and cheating should be a juicy topic, but Ariely manages to squash reader interest by (mostly) confining his experiments to sterile classrooms, where one group of student volunteers after another pencil in answers to one dull test after another, usually involving dotted matrixes, one-dollar bills, and paper shredders.  When Ariely and colleagues do leave the artificial environment of the classroom – sending a blind girl into a farmers’ market to buy tomatoes, for example – their research yields some interesting results.

But back to that classroom … our intrepid social scientist’s big discovery is this:  We all cheat, but only a little bit.  And if we can just get a few reminders that cheating is bad, maybe we won’t do it so much.

That’s not exactly a scientific breakthrough; it’s simple common sense.  And that’s the brutal truth.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

by Margery Allingham

British mystery novelist Allingham is less interested in clever plot twists than in her characters, which is both good and bad.  Good, because she’s created an unusually strong villain, the knife-wielding, tortured-soul Jack Havoc (a.k.a. “Johnny Cash” – I kid you not), but bad because her heroes are a bland bunch.  Whenever the action shifts to the story’s quartet of lovebirds, I was reminded of those old Marx Brothers movies – pure genius whenever the boys were on screen, but barely tolerable when the obligatory lovers took center stage.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)

                                                                 by Thomas Harris                                                                      

I suppose this is an example of why you should always read the book before you see the movie.  Harris’s Lambs is intelligent, suspenseful, and clearly one of the better serial-killer novels.  Yet in my Hollywood-influenced mind’s eye, F.B.I. trainee Clarice Starling has morphed into Jodie Foster, malevolent Hannibal Lecter is  Anthony Hopkins, and every dramatic chapter is accompanied by images from the film.  But kudos to Harris, because even though the book holds no surprises for anyone familiar with the movie, it’s still a gripping read.

© 2010-2026 grouchyeditor.com (text only)