clew's reviews: a book log

Third volumes, more alike

Neither A Spectacle of Corruption and The Damascened Blade, each third in a series by, respectively, David Liss and Barbara Cleverly, are as interesting as their first two volumes. They're both converging to a normal pattern of series adventure/mystery novels, of a tough but connected solitary man with a new wistful or cynical romance every book.

This is all right, but was done so completely by Raymond Chandler that I'd rather have had more of the social commentary that the total-outsiderness of the first novels had. For one thing, there's more contemporaneous fiction from either period that follows the well-connected. For another, the closer they get to being comfortable in their worlds, the less useful they are as commentary on their eras seen (will we nill we) from ours.

If I were fonder of either character, I would be less ruthless in wishing them interesting lives.

Damascened... has a lot of fun playing the blood-and-honour mores of the Scottish and Pathan highlands against each other. It tickles my memory that some pre-War fiction had even more fun with it, being much less shy about bloodshed and revenge, but I can't put my finger on it. Probably Kipling, of course:

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
       When two strong men stand face to face,
       tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

LCCN: PS 356 I7814 S64 2004 (A Spectacle of Corruption)

ISBN: 078671333X (The Damascened Blade)

So wrote clew in Book comparisons. , Mystery. | TrackBack