Book review: Georgette Heyer -- The Unfinished Clue

Country house murder mystery written and set in the early 1930s. Great fun, with an entertaining cast of suspects and some cunning red herrings.

Dinah Fawcett arrives at her married sister's house for the weekend, only to find Fay's household in turmoil. Fay's stepson has arrived home with his fiancee, a famous and extremely flamboyant cabaret dancer from Mexico. Fay's husband has taken this as well as you'd expect from a bullying martinet of a wealthy retired army officer. General Sir Arthur Billington-Smith has always despised his highly strung son, not least because years ago his mother ran away with another man.

This would be bad enough if there were just family present, but Sir Arthur has invited guests for the weekend, and naturally is now blaming Fay for their presence. There are other weekend guests too, some self-invited, others not. And then there are the neighbours who drop in, with or without an invitation...

Sir Arthur proceeds to give almost everyone staying in the house motivation for killing him, so it's no surprise when he's found dead in his study the next day, stabbed with his own paper knife. It's up to Inspector Harding of Scotland Yard to sift through the assorted stories the potential suspects have to tell. Not an easy task, given the mix of attention-seeking and attention-avoiding to be found at the house party, as the various participants try to paint their own actions in the fashion most congenial to them.

Dinah takes charge of the household, being possessed of both common sense and an unimpeachable alibi. These two things also make her a useful source of information for Harding about the people at the house, even if he has to allow for her having a vested interest in protecting her sister. The novel is primarily told from Dinah and Harding's viewpoints, and there's a nice romance sub-plot in the background that adds to the story without being allowed to overwhelm the main mystery plot.

The book was written in the 1930s and it shows in the attitude to class and race, with some of the characters being very stereotypical; but Heyer also deftly uses assumptions in those stereotypes to lay false trails. And for all the stereotyping, there are some lovely characterisations here. If 1930s country house cosies are your thing, this is a stylish and witty example of the genre.

Book review: James Blish - Galactic Cluster

UK edition of a selection of Blish's short stories and novellas. This has somewhat different contents to the US edition under the same collection name.

Common Time
Short about a test pilot flight of a faster than light ship (using the Haertel overdrive, a common strand in Blish's work). The two previous test flights left successfully but never came back, so this one is under total computer control and Garrard's primary job is to stay alive long enough to report back. The opening sequence is a vivid description of the effect of drive on time perception, with the perceived time rate decoupled from the physical time rate. This section is very hard sf in tone. It then goes into a passage that feels very New Wave to me, even though the story predates the New Wave movement. The juxtaposition is rather disconcerting. I've always loved the opening sequence, but I seem to be getting old and cranky as regards the middle section.

A Work of Art
One of my favourite pieces by Blish. Richard Strauss finds himself alive again in 2161, the product of a mind sculptor. As is quickly explained to him, his personality and talent has been recreated in the body of a musically talentless volunteer. Strauss welcomes the chance to write new music, and adapts well if crankily to the changes in society over 200 years, but is not impressed by modern music. He gradually comes to realise what the true artform of this era is. A moving exploration of identity and personality.

To Pay the Piper
The survivors of an apocalyptic war have been living in deep bunkers for years. The war goes on, but one side develops a method to re-educate the population so they can survive on the plague-ridden surface. The hard part -- it's a slow process that for practical reasons is to be restricted to the troops who will be sent to do final battle, but the civilian population want *out*. A politician exploits popular sentiment to lean on the scientists to give him priority...

Nor Iron Bars
Set in the same sequence as Common Time, but somewhat further on in the development of the Haertel overdrive. Space colonisation has begun, but the Haertel overdrive is not yet fit for shipping large numbers of humans. This is an experimental flight of another ftl drive -- and it too has strange effects, this time a disconnect between spatial dimensions. But this ship has passengers, giving the captain an added incentive to find a solution before the various side-effects kill people. Notable for showing an inter-racial couple in a story written in the 1950s.

Beep
Short story later expanded into a short novel, The Quincunx of Time. There's a spreading interstellar culture, and the intelligence service is using the top-secret Dirac transmitter, a communication device that offers instantaneous transmission over unlimited distances. Any message sent on a Dirac device can be picked up by any other Dirac, anywhere. Blish explores the practical and philosophical implications of the technology. I like this a lot, but a lot of people don't.

Beanstalk
Novella about a group of genetically engineered humans, and the problems they face in being accepted by standard issue humans. The group are tetraploids, with features common in polyploid life-forms -- longevity, large size and low fertility. It's an interesting way of looking at racial and cultural discrimination, as the group are of the same genetic stock and culture as the host culture, but are clearly differentiated by their much greater height, and have created their own sexual mores to deal with the twin problems of low fertility and the skewed gender ratio that has resulted from prospective parents being far more willing to use the treatment on male embryos than female. But it somehow falls a bit flat for me.

Overall, the collection's worth reading, but some stories are definitely more interesting than others.