The Waxworks Murder

After a lovely long night out, Sunday has been about reading. J. has been kitting out the Beach House / Chalet / shed with furniture, lamps, carpet, coffee table, even paintings... and I've been polishing off 'The Waxworks Murder' by John Dickson Carr. I'd never read one of his mysteries before, and this one came from the depths of my reading pile. It's a sassy and macabre 1930s mystery, set in the sleazier parts of Paris. As with most crime and thrillers, there's a soggy middle bit to the souffle for me - when it's all theories and surmising by the detective and his friends. I'm never so bothered by that. I want more of the tense conversations and set pieces, and more scenes of action and adventure. We get all of that here, anyway, as well, which is great.

I loved the creepiness of all this. Mostly it is set in a gloomy, rather nasty Waxworks Museum, populated almost wholly by effigies of killers and victims. There's a shambling old bloke and his frosty daughter in charge of the place and it's not long before we learn about secret keys and mysterious passageways and connections with a high class sex club next door. It's a club where people wear different coloured masks, signalling their status or desires. Lots of shady goings-on and glamorous depravity... And all the clues are tiny, it turns out. Things I never notice at the time. But I never look at these kinds of books as puzzles to solve. Is that wrong? I just let the whole thing unfold around me and don't go pushing at the mystery as I go along.

Am I reading the detectives wrongly, do you think?

My other great fun read of the day is The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters from 1978, which I mentioned the other day as something from my school library that I would love to read again. Ebay delivered - and I have to report it's just as wonderful a collection of stories as I remember. Again, like the 'Armada' Monster books, the characters are close to home - these are kids in ordinary schools, in ordinary towns, in circumstances not too far from the presumed reader's. We get dragon eggs hatching and monkeylike mermen with savage teeth, and evil newt spawn from outer space. Glorious.