Tag: Deal me in reading challenge

I’m a week behind – not in reading for the challenge, but for posting my thoughts, so today it’ll be two entries; one for this week and one for last.

As I’ve done for the other anthologies I’m using in this challenge, I’m creating one post per anthology – or in this case the boxed set of 4 volumes.  I’ll share some quick(ish) thoughts about each story as I read them and append them to the top of post.  Previous thoughts will be under the ‘read more’.  Since this is a multi-volume collection, it will cause a bit of a mess, but I’ll try to keep it neat.

Volume III:  The Forties and Fifties

No Motive by Daphne du Maurier:  ✭✭✭✭

Wow.  Who knew du Maurier write a story with zero melodrama?  This is a straight up mystery and we follow the private detective as he digs into the past of the victim in an effort to determine whether or not she committed suicide, and if so, why, or she was murdered.

du Maurier’s taste for tragedy is satisfied in the details and the suspense comes from how the private detective is going to report his findings.   A really solid short story from the maven of gothic fiction.

Volume IV: The Sixties to the Present (2000)

The Wink by Ruth Rendell: ✭✭✭

This volume and I are just not destined to be BFFs.  While Rendell’s writing in this story is excellent and she does a fantastic job in just a few pages of making these characters come to life, this is not a mystery at all.  This is a snippet from one woman’s life; a woman who lived through a horrible moment in her life alone, and had to face her attacker again and again throughout her life and how she finally levelled the playing field.  Well written but ultimately anti-climatic, and definitely no mystery about it.

 

Continue reading Great Stories of Crime and Detection (MbD’s Deal Me In challenge)