When I left off reading, Raskolnikov had committed the crime, been laid low by a fever, and has slowly recovered. He had been summoned to the police, a terror and a defeat, only to find they summoned him for debts, not murder.
Now, the fever is slowly leaving him, but he is still having nightmares. He hid the jewellery and told himself that he must have been ill when he committed the murder, or he would have done a better job of the crime and the aftermath (stains, hiding the loot, etc.). By his account, his incompetence is evidence that he couldn’t have been in his right mind, and thus, he must be relatively blameless for what he has done.
But good fortune has prevailed upon him in his illness. Natasha has been tending to him with soup and food, and his friend (Razumikhin) has arrived to help him recover financially, paying for a new suit and a doctor to attend to him. But when Luzhin, the sister’s fiancé, arrives, Rask goes a bit off on him and accuses him of his fears when reading his mother’s letter. Yet what set him off the most was his friend Raz debating whether a person already charged with the murder was really guilty or if his alibi was so weak that it must have been true.
The guilty mind is upon him for much of the 10%, including running into the police clerk and accusing him of thinking him the murderer when the police clerk was thinking no such thing. But as Rask escapes his bedroom and wanders the city, he is overcome repeatedly with dark thoughts, including that of suicide. Or to turn himself in. He even returns to the scene of the crime and pretends he wants to rent the apartment, but they throw him out for being strange.
It’s fascinating to see how the guilty mind is plaguing him.
Mary Russell, a young, financially independent woman, chanced upon a strange retired beekeeper in the countryside and became Sherlock Holmes’ apprentice.
What I Liked
I have a long list of To Be Read books, and they sit on my Kindle until fancy strikes me, and I start reading, often having no memory of how why or when I chose that title to join the queue. So it was delightful to get a few pages in and realize it’s a Sherlock Holmes story. I liked that the book reveals a few stories/cases, keeping the mix neither too long (some of Conan Doyle’s novels) nor too short (the enumerable short stories). We get to see some of her training and her adventures at school. It’s interesting to see some of the treatment of WWI, with a looming “baddie” on the horizon, who proves more than capable of taking them both on.
What I Didn’t Like
There are a couple of long lulls in the stories where nothing happens. Since the stories are told from Russell’s perspective, you have no idea what Holmes is doing during those times. This is rather reminiscent of the Hound of the Baskervilles, where Holmes is gently felt but not seen. There are also a couple of significant errors by Holmes, corrected by Russell, and they feel forced. It works well when she thinks of something he didn’t, connecting some dots, but when she thinks of potential impacts on others that he is oblivious to, it doesn’t ring true. It is sort of like chess…while he might miss an opening gambit or a rogue move, he wouldn’t miss obvious moves likely to follow the opening three or four moves.
I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m stuck in a rut lately and that I might need a bit of a kick in the butt to jar my brain into a different perspective. Occasionally, I’ll grab a self-help business book from one of the big names to see what they say that might resonate with me.
Stuff from Zig Ziglar has been around for a long time, and lots of people have bought his tapes etc. I’m often suspicious of certain types of self-styled “gurus” who are about an inch-deep and 10 miles wide in their approach, and after reading MYWE, Ziglar is one of the best/worst examples.
I really struggled with his writing style for two reasons. First, he uses a strong “selling” approach to persuasion…basically, the methodology is that if I tell you 10 superficial things that are simplistically true, you’ll likely agree with them all and then when I feed you malarkey as the 11th, you’re already agreeing to the other 10 so you’ll swallow it as truth. One of the biggest criticisms of this type of persuasion is in biased research where it is “acceptance by association”, not because the logic holds or because you actually agree with the 11th statement. Most of the chapters are cliché after cliché, and I started to be reminded of a Yes, Minister episode. A string of relatively unrelated statements that get you agreeing so that you want to agree with the last one like you were “convinced” even if the 11th has very little to do with the previous 10. Reading a long series of very short anecdotes left me practically exhausted trying to figure out where the “wheat” was compared with all the “chaff”.
The second element is one of credibility, and it started to grate on me with all the anecdotes. For example, he would say “This famous person told me this.” Which would be some perfectly crafted line that the person likely never said, and likely NEVER said it to them, it was like a talk show or something. But I searched on a couple of the quotes, and they were attributed to that person, but with different language and syntax. Kind of like reading a Grade 9 essay by someone who thinks 20 quotes strung together makes an argument. Then he would refer to one of the people that he has helped … say for example, an almost illiterate high-school dropout who listened to his tapes and it transformed his life. Which is demonstrated by the 20 lines of perfect prose that the person wouldn’t have been capable of actually saying, given their background, and they would never have talked that way. But the text swears that this is verbatim what he said. The credibility gets strained.
But what bothered me most was that he would have these series of anecdotes, all of which he says he experienced personally with the people quoted, and then he’ll throw in a joke that happened to a specific person or him personally, but it’s a joke that is 50 years old. He includes it for a laugh, sure, but he presents with the same approach as the other 10 stories. Which really makes most of the stories seem “faked”.
I don’t really care when he proselytizes about the amazing benefits of teaching values from the Bible (ignoring that many of the largest scandals of the 20th Century were those that devoted their life to the same “teachings”), or that he associates the downfall of society with television and soap operas in particular. It just makes him look stupid.
And yet, some people have found some nuggets in his work. So I stuck with it. And found a few lines that resonated with me.
You’re not going to change one whisper about yesterday (Chapter 1). It’s a typical quote about not letting the past define you, but it’s well-framed here.
Failure is an event, not a person (Chapter 1). This is a popular theme that people often pitch as just dusting yourself off, to keep going, let the past be the past, not the definition of your future. Often with some example of baseball players who don’t bat 1.000 or clichés like “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” But it’s a slightly different framing. Failure is a moment in time. It’s something that “happens”, shifting the idea a bit away from you. I prefer to think of it a bit like a Star Trek: The Next Generation quote from Picard to Data about how you can do everything exactly right and still lose/fail.
Quoting Dr. Joyce Brothers about self-image (Chapter 2). Paraphrased, but that you cannot consistently perform in a manner which is inconsistent with the way you see yourself. I’ve seen this used before, and often mischaracterized as the more popular form, “If you want to be a success, you have to visualize yourself as a success.” But that’s not what the quote is about…it’s more about a double-edged sword. How you see yourself guides how you perform, and if you are just pretending, your performance will not measure up to the real you. People often want to use it as “fake it until you make it”, when in reality it is more about “being honest with yourself”. Good quote, totally misused here though.
You can’t make a good deal with a bad guy (Chapter 3). It’s a nice framing of something I have heard in a different way from a lawyer who writes about the publishing industry. His version is more like “don’t do business with crooks”. Or the ever popular, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” They are all variations on a theme, but again, it is nicely framed here.
Platitudes from his mother (Chapter 3). While hardly original, I liked the phrases he heard from his mother — “When a task is one begun, you leave it not until it’s done,” and “Be a matter great or small, you do it well or not at all.”
Don’t try to change the boss (Chapter 4). I think this one resonates a bit with me as there are some things I’m dealing with where it is really frustrating that someone else is not doing their job. I want to enter their lane and correct it, but it’s not really my place to correct it. I think it’s stupid, but it’s also not a good investment of my time. I do like the framing, and linked to a stronger element of “don’t let the way the other person treats you affect or determine the way you treat them”.
At work you can fool the boss, you can even fool the people around you, but as employers, you will never fool the people below you. (Chapter 5) It’s a great life lesson to remember, although Ziglar presents it more about managing your self-image.
A lockdown happens at school, and five kids on the third floor end up in the only unlocked room they can find — the boy’s washroom.
What I Liked
I downloaded the book because my son was reading it for high school, and given the potentially intense “shooting in a school” scenario, I wanted to be able to talk with him about it if needed. His response to the book was more like mine — “meh”. Good, but not great. It’s great that the five kids are all different…Alice is an introvert, her brother Noah is autistic, Isabelle is the popular clique type, Hogan is a bad boy jock, and Xander is a camera nerd. As they realize it’s not a simple drill but instead that there is an active shooter in the school, the tone of the experience and anxiety levels mount. You find out that everyone has a darker secret or issue they’re dealing with, and the aftermath is mostly decent after the requisite action sequence ending.
What I Didn’t Like
Obviously, the entire premise is a rip-off of the Breakfast Club. It’s more “action-oriented”, and more contemporary for themes, but even some of the sub-themes are identical (and not simply as high-school tropes). And while suitable for some more mature middle-age readers perhaps, I expect most high-schoolers would see some of the plot elements come into focus WAY faster than the characters in the story…the involvement of one of the characters in the overall plot, what Xander took pictures of that got him into trouble, why Hogan is messed up (and why doesn’t anyone in authority know what’s going on, since he’d have about 5 different social worker types on his case?), and what’s going on with Isabelle’s love life. Finally, I found the portrayal of the cops clearing the building to be extremely unrealistic. Almost all large cities have trained their police forces in Active Shooter Response tactics, and they wouldn’t be all hanging out in other parts of the school doing nothing. I also find it also extremely coincidental that of the five people in the bathroom (which btw does have a lock, belying the original premise!), not only are three of them in the same grade (Alice, Hogan, and Isabelle), they actually do all know each other while pretending vaguely that they don’t.
The Bottom Line
Could be decent premise for remake of The Breakfast Club
Charlotte Ellison is an unmarried woman who tends to be blunt and outspoken rather than dissemble when speaking with men. She is vaguely in love with her sister’s husband and a little bored with life, until a murderer claims a neighbour. And then a couple of maids. Who will be next? Who is killing the young women of Cater Street, a Victorian-era upper-middle class neighbourhood? Inspector Pitt is investigating the case, suspecting everyone equally until they can be eliminated. When he isn’t becoming increasingly smitten with Charlotte.
What I Liked
The setting makes the romance side of things surprisingly decent, more subtle and understated rather than the harsher more brash aspects of contemporary romance mysteries. I had read the book some 20 years ago and only had a vague recollection of the killer (I knew why, but a little off on who). The tension is good as is the elements of suspecting various friends and neighbours.
As an aside, a long time ago, I was a member of an online group whose rules of etiquette were the standard ones you see in any social media group, except they had one content element — no discussions of Anne Perry’s personal life. Apparently people had previously gotten off topic more than once when discussing her books, and it led to acrimonious arguments about the writer, not the books. I sought her work out PRECISELY because people thought it was relevant; after I read it, I decided I didn’t care. I like the books, don’t care about her old criminal behaviour.
What I Didn’t Like
I would have liked to see more of the Inspector with Charlotte discussing non-crime-related topics, sharing more casual intimacies than was suggested up to the denouement. However, by contrast, there is a lot of time spent on women openly discussing double standards or a long-time mistress of one of the main characters, neither of which were likely for the time portrayed. The mistress thread even lends a red herring with no real subterfuge or payoff.
The Bottom Line
Come for the murder, stay for the romantic intrigue
