More Fun Than a Barrel of Murders Monday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

The stories in The Listerdale Mystery are nearly all in the "silly fun" category of Christie shorts - lots of perky young women testing their men for manliness, and downtrodden young men getting a new lease on life through some staged or accidental adventure. When you line them all up together, Christie's faux-adventure

Comments

[liadtbunny]

I guess it cuts out the stampede of reviewers rushing to be the one who shouts 'self insert' first!

[evelyn_b]

Pre-emptive measure! Asimov is in the "cast of characters" list on the first page, so no one's even surprised when he shows up a few pages in. And the back-cover material is just Asimov and the narrator discussing the "real" murder in relation to the murder mystery "Asimov" is contracted to write. So everyone who reads this book knows what they're getting into, self-insertwise.

I think the "narrator" character is a friend-insert, meant to be a friendly caricature of Harlan Ellison - though that's just a guess based on the dedication and jokes. It's a really self-indulgent book, not necessarily in a bad way.

[liadtbunny]

I'm glad the book isn't too bad, because it sounds a hair's breathe of tipping down into to a pit of awful self-indulgence.