nocto

I read all the rest of Josephine Tey's books as a teenager and really enjoyed them. I could never persuade myself to read this one though. History wasn't my thing (and still isn't) and this book sounded as dull as dishwater to me.

Another lifetime later I'm pleased to find that this is a very entertainingly different mystery. It reminded me a little of the Lury.Gibson book Dangerous Data that I read recently though Tey writes a much better story. Nothing happens in the book, we just have Inspector Grant laid up in hospital with a gammy leg bored out of his mind. He gets interested in a portrait of Richard III that one of his visitors brings him. Not realising at first who the picture portrays he can't see it as the face of a murderer. So he goes on to rake through historical records with the aid of a young American researcher to find out if Richard really did murder the princes in the tower.

I've no idea if the history in this book is realistic or not and I find that I don't really care. The point is that there's always more to any situation than you see on the surface and that often the facts that are found in the details are more revealing than the "facts" found in reported accounts. I found this story fascinating and I'm sorry that it took me so long to get around to reading it.

Purchased on 8th November 2000.

[My comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers!]

[on the setting]

I'm about halfway through and I'm finding that Florence is coming more alive the further I read. I like the way that I don't feel like I'm on a sightseeing tour but that it's the accumulation of small details, like having to do removals and street cleaning in the middle of the night in order to avoid blocking the narrow streets, that are really bringing the scenery to life for me.

I also like the juxtaposition of Florence with characters like the vicar and his wife and Miss White, this kind of comparison brings out the foreignness in the setting for me.

[on the police characters, uniforms]

Generally I got confused with which police characters were which. I found the two British detectives the easiest to keep track of. I was a bit bemused as to why the Marshal was ill for most of the book when it seems that this is his series. The Marshal was the clearest of the Italian policemen to me though. I found the Captain completely forgettable and though I couldn't forget Bacci he didn't make a big impression on me. I guess that there are a lot of policemen in a relatively short book and they couldn't all be fully fleshed out.

Well, I think uniforms are a useful recognition aid to know who is supposed to be directing the traffic or serving the customers or whatever but I'm not a fan of their use as status symbols and wouldn't want to wear one myself. I don't remember the big deal about Bacci's uniform, it must hve gone over my head as I think quite a lot did in this book, probably because of the very fragmented way I read it.

[on the non-police characters]

First of all I had reader's confusion syndrome with two many C's! Cipolla, Cesarini and Cipriani were way too alike as names for me to keep them straight and I spent half the book flicking back to figure out which one was which. I think that means I didn't find the characters well enough fleshed out.

I found the expats much simpler to keep straight than the Italians. They seemed to be both more individual than the Italians but also more stereotypical examples of the English abroad at the same time.

I didn't have a good picture of him as he was dead before we met him and the fragments of his life we found out about didn't seem to present a consistent picture. I thought it was odd that the British police had been sent over to help out thoough merely because he was related to someone influential. That seemed a bit odd.

I think the decision to portray the victim as a character or an object is the author's really and the reader has to go along with it. I think I prefer books where the victim is a character but it all depends on the book.

Purchased on 8th February 2002.

I couldn't wait another year again for the next Rozan so I splashed out on the US hardback. This one is narrated by the male half of the PI team, Bill Smith, and the characters are closer to home investigating in New York City and New Jersey.

I didn't like this as much as other episodes in the series, something about it missed me. I think it was that the setting was mainly concerned with American football and high schools and that Rozan was taking it for granted that I'd know a lot of details that as an Englishwoman who's totally ignorant about American football I missed. I couldn't work out what time of year the book was set, only that it was at the end of the football season. In the UK the football (soccer) season ends in May or thereabouts but taking it to be that didn't seem to make sense with some of the other things in the book.

That isn't to say that I didn't like the book or that I missed the whole point. Just that some of the details went over my head when I'd rather that they hadn't done.

Mostly this book is about young people trying to live up to what adults expect of them and about how lousy some of those adults are. I did feel that some of Rozan's characters were painted in black and white in this book. One of the things I usually like about her characters is that no one is all bad but I thought that a few of the adult characters in this book were painted in pretty dark shades of grey. I think that level of characterisation was used on the adults so that the adolescent characters who were the main focus of the book reflected the adults but I still found it disappointing.

I'm sounding very negative when my main reaction to this book was positive, it's just that I think that Rozan can and has done better.

Purchased on 20th March 2002.