stonepicnicking_okapi (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2019-12-23 08:40 am
stonepicnicking_okapi) wrote2019-12-23 08:40 am
Entry tags:
What I'm Listening to: The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
I just finished the audiobook version of Anthony Horowitz's The Word is Murder, read by Rory Kinnear. The narrator does a great job. He's a solid voice, especially for that of Hawthorne.
I enjoyed the story. I was hesitant because last year I had noped out of The Magpie Murders by the same author after about 1 minute of listening.
I did have to grit my teeth and bear with the author's megalomania (he's the main character of the story). It is a phenomena I see a lot in famous clever people (Stephen Fry and Mark Gatiss come to mind), they are clever, very clever, and do brilliant things, but damn if they don't want you to know their Cleverness at every step. I mean, I know he did Foyle's War and I loved the first three seasons of it. I've never heard of Alex Rider, though.
The plot hook, however, a woman plans her own funeral and then is murdered 6 hours later, is so hook-y that I just had to know who did it. And it is brilliant. All the clues are there. Red herrings. The lot.
But the other thing is after reading a lot of fic, I have a different perspective. It's fic. Brilliant, long, self-insert, cleverly-craft fic, but at the end of the day, it's just fic (I thought that about "A Study in Emerald", too; if that wins a Hugo then AO3 definitely deserves a Hugo) and there are plenty of lovely people on the internet who crank that stuff out for free every day. And they don't have agents or meetings with Steven Spielberg that they feel the compelling urge to name-drop over and over and over. It's like if there was a guy with a great story and an equally great ego that needs public stroking by strangers.
Still, it's a great story told in a great voice.
I enjoyed the story. I was hesitant because last year I had noped out of The Magpie Murders by the same author after about 1 minute of listening.
I did have to grit my teeth and bear with the author's megalomania (he's the main character of the story). It is a phenomena I see a lot in famous clever people (Stephen Fry and Mark Gatiss come to mind), they are clever, very clever, and do brilliant things, but damn if they don't want you to know their Cleverness at every step. I mean, I know he did Foyle's War and I loved the first three seasons of it. I've never heard of Alex Rider, though.
The plot hook, however, a woman plans her own funeral and then is murdered 6 hours later, is so hook-y that I just had to know who did it. And it is brilliant. All the clues are there. Red herrings. The lot.
But the other thing is after reading a lot of fic, I have a different perspective. It's fic. Brilliant, long, self-insert, cleverly-craft fic, but at the end of the day, it's just fic (I thought that about "A Study in Emerald", too; if that wins a Hugo then AO3 definitely deserves a Hugo) and there are plenty of lovely people on the internet who crank that stuff out for free every day. And they don't have agents or meetings with Steven Spielberg that they feel the compelling urge to name-drop over and over and over. It's like if there was a guy with a great story and an equally great ego that needs public stroking by strangers.
Still, it's a great story told in a great voice.