{"id":3028,"date":"2019-03-19T03:10:52","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T10:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3028"},"modified":"2019-03-19T03:10:52","modified_gmt":"2019-03-19T10:10:52","slug":"peter-lovesey-the-crime-of-miss-oyster-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/peter-lovesey-the-crime-of-miss-oyster-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Lovesey: The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Peter Lovesey has written some of my very favorite detective novels \u2013 The False Inspector Dew<\/em>(1982), Rough Cider <\/em>(1986) and The Reaper <\/em>(2000), not to mention his long and delightful Peter Diamond series.\u00a0 One of the things Lovesey is the very absolute best at is simply plot.\u00a0 In his novels, these can be longer and more complex affairs, but in this collection of short stories, the plots are deadly little masterpieces of wit and style.<\/p>\n

Short stories are a tricky medium.\u00a0 In a short span of pages, an author needs to draw the reader in, make them care about at least one person in the narrative, and tell a completely contained story, soup to nuts.\u00a0 Lovesey\u2019s elegant writing and humor serve him well, as story after story in this collection, reprinted here by the venerable Crippen & Landru, are both memorable and concise.<\/p>\n

Almost every story in the collection turns a fact just slightly on its head to skew the perspective of the reader, but when you finish the story you realize the simplicity of the puzzle.\u00a0 The clever Lovesey just wasn\u2019t letting you see it.\u00a0 The first story, The Crime of Miss Oyster Brown, <\/em>concerns two sisters, Oyster and Pearl (I told you he was a wit) and the crime seems to be so negligible that as you read you\u2019re sure there\u2019s more to the story.\u00a0 There is and there isn\u2019t in this neat little tale about the relationship of two sisters and their connection to the village where they live.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Peter Lovesey<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Where is Thy Sting? <\/em>A wife is caring for a husband who no longer speaks, and hosting a house guest who may or may not have something criminal up his sleeve.\u00a0 As a reader you are pretty sure he does, it\u2019s the way it\u2019s discovered that\u2019s the twist.\u00a0 There\u2019s Curl Up and Die, <\/em>which is told completely by the narrator as he speaks, with no interruptions.\u00a0 There\u2019s even a \u201cyoudunnit,\u201d the first story ever written where the reader is the killer. (Or was it?\u00a0 Read Mr. Lovesey\u2019s entertaining prologue).<\/p>\n

There are dysfunctional families, unhappy or uneasy husbands and wives, traitorous friends and relatives, and every story is a gem of precise storytelling, holding back just enough for a surprise at the end.\u00a0 It\u2019s a delight to read as these were written mid-career and Mr. Lovesey was truly at a confident peak of his writing powers.\u00a0 They are assured, funny, horrifying and hard to put down.\u00a0 I think my favorite was A Case of Butterflies<\/em>, about a kidnapped wife \u2013 Lovesey manages to make this story both heartbreaking and inevitable, while quickly and firmly establishing a pretty wide array of characters for so short a span of pages.\u00a0 These are certainly the work of a master of the craft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Lovesey has written some of my very favorite detective novels \u2013 The False Inspector Dew(1982), Rough Cider (1986) and The Reaper (2000), not to mention his long and delightful Peter Diamond series.\u00a0 One of the things Lovesey is the very absolute best at is simply plot.\u00a0 In his novels, these can be longer and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,87,86,85],"class_list":["post-3028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british","tag-crippen-landru","tag-peter-lovesey","tag-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3031,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3028\/revisions\/3031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}