I have a blog now.

My blog is about books, what I'm reading, and how it's affecting my day-to-day life. I figure this is as good as anything.

In accordance with this, here's a short note I first wrote on facebook about what I'm currently reading, entitled "A Treasury of Victorian Detective Stories", which I bought by-the-pound at the awesome thrift store.

----


Following in a long tradition of the bells and whistles of Dickens being much more exciting than the actual plot (I mean, nobody could name a character or a book like Dickens, you have to admit), I just read three short detective stories by him and was really underwhelmed. I shall recount the plot of one of them for you:

1. A woman nicknamed The Countess is murdered in her bed. (And yes, she was murdered, I triple-checked.) A set of men's gloves, with the initials TR and a small cross monogrammed onto them, are found under her pillow. They are very dirty but show signs of recently having been cleaned.

2. The inspector in charge of the case takes the gloves to all the places he knows of in the city where one could have gloves cleaned. Eight or nine different shops in all. This takes several days.

3. This is all for naught, so he decides to go see a play in the middle of the afternoon because he's bored.

4. He sits next to a gentleman at the play who has a thorough and interesting knowledge of the actors on stage.

5. They decide to get a drink together; they refer to this as "draining", which seems to me to be the opposite of what they are actually doing.

6. The gentleman turns out to be the son of a glove-cleaner. He says his father could probably recognize the gloves. But he also asks the inspector to not mention that they met at a play. (?!)

7. The glove-cleaner father recognizes the gloves, having cleaned them a few days ago, as belonging to a textile shipper who works several streets over.

8. As a reward for this info, the inspector takes the glove-cleaner father out for a draining.

9. The textile guy is arrested.

10. His story is that he was courting a cousin of the Countess, and left a pair of his gloves on the coffee table. The Countess, seeing that they were left behind, decided to give them to her maid so she (the maid) could wear them whilst cleaning the fireplace.

11. The Countess apparently forgot to give them to the maid, and the maid, thinking they belonged to the Countess, puts them under the Countesses' pillow. (I'm not sure if this is a common storage space for gloves, or what.)

12. The inspector accepts this explanation, releases the textile guy, and NO FURTHER ACTION OF ANY KIND IS TAKEN.

What/!?!?!?! WHO KILLED THE COUNTESS? I DON'T KNOW. NEITHER DOES CHARLES DICKENS, APPARENTLY.