much of "death of a hollow man" is the minute detailing of characters' deeply flawed personalities and complete detachment from reality. the murder doesn't occur for a good hundred or so pages, and the characters are all so entirely unlikeable that it doesn't seem particularly important to find who did it or why. for me, it felt like graham was trying to be too clever or cute, so characters are always wriggling and dandling and having butterball hands and flossy curls etc etc. incredibly pathetic characters like avery and deidre were no more appealing than stoic and brilliant inspector barnaby, who spends about two minutes reflecting on how the pursuit of his career destroyed his wife's chances of pursuing her own career and doing what she loved - and then grumbles about how she's asked him to spend an hour painting a set piece. I wasn't particularly impressed by his bit at the end, either, where apparently he became so fierce that his wife felt he was a stranger. there's a kind of nastiness in everything that I didn't care for, which you could argue is just a depiction of the gritty realities of the human condition (barf) but the tone is so flippant and facetious that I couldn't take any of it seriously, it just wasn't consequential to me - it's a completely different nastiness from the grit in raymond chandler's writing, for example, or the lighthearted poirot-is-shaped-like-an-egg poking of fun we might see in agatha christie. there's nothing really entertaining or innovative about a dude who hates women and communists and gay men and cheats on his wife and is a ginger (his antics are relentless) or an older woman who's not handling her age well, so everyone notices that she's eating too much, wearing clown makeup, got big pores oh man it's endless! everyone's just so disgusting, with the single exception of barnaby's daughter, cully, who's compared to nefertiti at one point and does everything with grace and loveliness; I'm afraid the only way she could have been interesting is if she'd committed the crime. also what was up with all the typographical errors? maybe it was just my copy, but so many quotation marks were missing or attached to the wrong sentence, at one point "barnaby" was written as "bamaby" -- things that really should have been caught.
Estreei-me com Caroline Graham no primeiro volume desta colecção - Morte na Aldeia - e foi com entusiasmo que peguei em mais uma das suas histórias. Com um desenvolver de história um pouco mais lento do que aquele que esperava, Morte em Palco mostrou-se uma leitura fácil, cheia de peripécias e com muitas interrogações.O cenário leva-nos para um palco de teatro em que os seus protagonistas são personagens muito curiosos. Cada actor tem as suas manias e todos buscam os seus momentos de ribalta, uns mais à vontade que outros. Quando existe um que é, claramente, o líder, as intrigas e invejas são mais que naturais. A peça que se prepara, Amadeus, envolve um certo grau de risco que irá elevar ainda mais a grandiosidade do grande artista central. O que não se estava à espera era que a cena tão ensaiada e cuidadosamente preparada resultasse num autêntico desastre em tom de banho de sangue.O interrogatório começa logo de seguida e é neste intrincado desenrolar de acontecimentos que a cabeça do leitor começa a ferver com suposições e perguntas. Quem, o quê, porquê? Razões parecem existir de forma infinita, mas as motivações não se mostram de todo claras. Gosto da forma como a autora aborda cada personagem e, dado o tempo em que foi escrito, assume a homossexualidade e a bissexualidade de forma tão natural. Também os amores e desamores, paixões e ódios, a sinceridade e gestos desinteressados, são todos contextualizados em circunstâncias realistas e que tornam todo o enredo bastante humano, tanto nas coisas boas como nas coisas mesquinhas e dispensáveis.O desfecho é tão previsível como inesperado. Por muito que a desconfiança nos tenha acompanhado durante grande parte da leitura, a surpresa acaba por surgir com a confirmação, afinal na minha opinião, pareciam haver candidatos mais fortes! Mais um livro da colecção Crime à Hora do Chá que se tornou uma das minhas preferidas com estes policiais tão característicos.
Do You like book Death Of A Hollow Man (2006)?
Re-read this for the 10th time or so.....Love it♥
—Pippii
This was a great read. The lead actor in an amateur production of "Amadeus" dies by his own hand in the last act - it's all part of the storyline, but the blade of the razor that he uses to slit his throat was supposed to have tape on it. Unfortunately, the tape is missing and he dies in front of 100 members of cast, crew and audience on opening night. Tom Barnaby and his sergeant Troy are both in the audience and immediately take over, but are stymied after interviewing everyone. Lots of little back stories about everyone, including the Barnaby's. I think this one was even better than the first.
—Lorraine
Oh, I should never watch the dramatization of a novel if I'm planning to read it, because I actually knew the identity of the killer before I started. I love the Inspector Barnaby murder mysteries dramatized on the Biography channel, and they have renewed my interest in Caroline Graham's books which have just been sitting here, unread, on my shelves for years.So on to this book: who would like it? Anyone who's followed the series on television would enjoy it; anyone who likes British mysteries would also like this one.The setting is the Causton Amateur Dramatic Society (CADS); the group is currently putting on a production of Amadeus. The dramatis personae include the director, Harold, who is a twit and has an over-inflated sense of his worth to the project (or any project by CADS for that matter), the leading man, Esslyn, who is quite wealthy but yet hated by everyone for his snobbery and pompery; his wife Kitty, a young 20-something; Esslyn's first wife and her husband; Tim & Avery, a gay couple who rent out a room to Nicholas, a young student who desperately wants to succeed in the theater; Deirdre, the girl Friday who does pretty much everything Harold tells her even though he makes ridiculous demands, and who is ridiculed by many of the cast members; and David and Colin Smy, a a young man and his dad. It seems that on opening night, one of these people switched razors from the prop tray so that Esslyn, as Salieri, cuts his throat with a real razor in front of the audience at the end of the play.Barnaby, who is in the audience because his wife is a member of CADS, takes charge immediately, along with his gripey, complaining sergeant, Troy. But it seems that pretty much everyone has a motive to kill Esslyn, so getting to the bottom of this mystery is tougher than it seems.Recommended for those who enjoy a mix of cozy/police procedural; it might be good to start with book #1 before reading the second.
—Nancy Oakes
