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tannat

Tannat

Not so much a blog; just lots of books

Currently reading

The Grace Year
Kim Liggett
The New Voices of Science Fiction
Jamie Wahls, Sarah Pinkser, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Rebecca Roanhorse, S. Qiouyi Lu, Darcie Little Badger, Kelly Robson, Nino Cipri, Amal El-Mohtar, Sam J. Miller, E. Lily Yu, Alice Sola Kim, Suzanne Palmer, Alexander Weinstein, Rich Larson
Progress: 13%
Engineering Animals: How Life Works
Alan Mcfadzean, Mark Denny
Progress: 125/314pages
The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization
Nicholas P. Money
Conservation of Shadows
Yoon Ha Lee
Progress: 22%
Le premier jour
Marc Levy
Progress: 180/496pages
Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Penguin Classics)
Herman Melville
Manifold: Time
Stephen Baxter, Chris Schluep
Progress: 99/480pages
The Long War
Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett
Progress: 68/501pages

Homicide Sanitarium by Fredric Brown

Homicide Sanitarium - Fredric Brown

This is a short story collection that might be best described as within the off-kilter section of the hard-boiled detective genre. There's humour, an Arsenic and Old Lace reference (which I suppose would have been pretty current when it was written), and a lot of people trying to get away with murder. Plus one guy who tries to convince another that he killed his wife while simultaneously trying to get away with murder.

 

I didn't love all the stories equally, but they were all entertaining. Probably my least favourite was The Cat from Siam. Or maybe Listen to the Mockingbird, since I keep forgetting what it was about (I keep thinking about it as the last story and not by its title). I'm not sure what my favourite was... Maybe Red-Hot and Hunted, the one that starts out like a play about a guy who tries to convince another that he just murdered his wife and the other guy thinks he's just trying to get the part of a guy who killed his wife in a Bluebeard play he's putting on...

 

Yeah, a lot of the stories are like that. They start off straight-forward and then Brown tweaks them and gives them a spin (generally a wobbly-spin). If that sounds like your cup of tea, and you see this collection available, you might want to pick it up.

 

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