Agatha Christie: Passenger to Frankfurt

You know how her books usually are: tightly plotted, lots of action, interesting characters. None of those things happened in this book. The characters had no depth whatsoever. The plot was nonsense and did not hang together. I don't think I could even tell you what it was supposed to be, never mind what it was. The main characters vanished for large portions of the book. And everyone, absolutely everyone, went on long rambling speeches about NOTHING, like about how the Youth of Today Are Budding Fascists, based on, again, nothing.

It also went into some kind of weird and vague alternate future where Things Are Otherwise. Worldwide riots by The Youth.

And there was a bizarre fixation on Hitler youth and Siegfried and actual Hitler getting exported to South America. Plus Big Charlotte, one of the most hateful depictions of a fat person I've ever seen, and that includes J.K. Rowling, who hates them a whole lot.

There was nothing you wondered about or wanted to know, other than "What the hell is going on?" and "Will this person ever shut up?" Seriously, everyone just had meetings and infodumped. It was exposition 24/7. People tried to hit the main character with cars twice, but then he went into their stronghold or whatever and nobody cared? At the end he and the other main character decided over telegram to get married, despite no chemistry and no relationship to speak of--and he is obsessed with how she looks just like his sister. They were off screen traveling the world for ages but for no clear reason and accomplished nothing. Literally he wanted to know what his goal was on this trip and was told he wasn't allowed to know. And still went.

Also there was a magic science thing to make everyone benevolent permanently, called Benvo, which we must not use! We can't let you use it! The formula has been destroyed! Plus scientist is dying! Then he gets magically returned to health from someone getting shot in front of him. It was the shock! So did they use it? Unclear. Nothing was clear. It didn't even end properly. And there's the weirdest epilogue mainly about this little girl who has never been in the book up to this point.

They should not have published this book, if she was as far gone as it seems she was. That's unkind to an excellent author, though maybe it reveals that even authors we admire have depths of weird obsessions that we'd rather not know about. Everyone is human, racists and every kind of -phobe included. It was a bit like having Thanksgiving dinner with that ancient and witty great-aunt you always liked and discovering she gets really racist when she has two glasses of wine.

Truly the worst published novel I've ever read, even worse than The Goldfinch, which is really saying something. Also it made me wonder if I was making accidental references to terrible racist material when I named my old cat Siegfried. No! I just read the medieval text! Medieval texts were there first. Aw, man.

Agatha Christie: Sleeping Murder

This was a fascinating read for me, partly because it solved a story problem I've been having with a work in progress that's been stuck in draft form for ages. I don't even want to think about how long. A decade? Brrrr.

That novel is Summerlands, which anyone who reads anything I write will know keeps cropping up regularly as I get all excited to tackle it again, then get discouraged by the way it never quite works.

I wrote it when I didn't know how to write novels yet. It's strange how completely dysfunctional it is as a draft, while having two absolutely amazing characters. 

Sleeping Murder is about Gwen and Giles, two New Zealanders who are moving to England for no clear reason. (It doesn't matter.) Gwen picks a town and buys a house and then has repeated eerie experiences about the house, things she knows that she could not possibly know, including a sudden terrifying memory of seeing a murder. She thinks she's going insane until Miss Marple (yay!) talks her through it and Gwen finds out she actually did live in that house as a small child. 

The book was so spooky up to this point that I was afraid it would be supernatural in nature. That's not my cup of tea. But 70s Agatha Christie novels often incorporate this type of absolutely terrifying suspense (at least, to me) that seems like it includes supernatural elements. It's never supernatural! Spoiler alert! This happens in several novels of hers that I can think of and gets me every time. But I am a known chicken. 

Gwen and Miss Marple and then Giles embark on research to find out who Helen was--the murder victim, as Gwen remembers her name--and what actually happened to her. 

They follow all sorts of trails and track down her family and the sad end that came to Gwen's father, which she didn't even know about, as she was raised by family members back in New Zealand. They line up a crew of possible suspects, all of whom I suspected equally in turn, as I'm terrible at figuring out who committed the crime. This time I actually did figure it out before it was explained, purely because of one particular clue about the brandy.

The way Christie lays out clues and covers them up with confusion and misdirection is obviously brilliant. I'm easy to misdirect, it seems. The clues are all there and everything is watertight, thank goodness, unlike some recent things I've read and watched. It's an incredibly satisfying ending as it all comes clear at once. 

I realized I need to line up some suspects myself. Well, last year I realized the novel lacked a plot entirely. It was these two main characters coming to grips with their major damage and their ways of acting out that only hurt themselves. That's great and all, but it's not a plot. The mystery I added last year added a plot. But now, as I apparently need to get hit on the head with a coconut, two by four, or other large object, I need to line up suspects for the mystery.

That novel's mystery is: what happened to the two girls' mother? Again, I picked Sleeping Murder more or less at random in the library. I just thought it was one I hadn't read, which turned out to be true. But it's about Gwen's stepmother's murder and finding out what actually happened to her. And if she was actually murdered, who did it? 

My story should be equally mystifying about what happened to their mother. And if she was murdered, who did it? Their father is bizarrely cold and distant and alarming so it would be easy to think of him as a suspect, if they decide she was murdered. They've been raised far away by two different aunts, so they don't know him or each other or anything about their mother. In at least one draft, they thought those aunts were their mothers. Then only one sister did. I can't even remember where it stands now.

I need to rewrite that novel entirely. From scratch, from the ground up. I'm tempted to include all those fun things like letters and texts and email and historical documents like marriage licenses and whatnot. What does a coroner's report look like when someone disappears boating and is never found? I have no idea if you even need or get one in that case. Look at all the things I don't know. What happens in that case? Do I want to include that in the story as something someone says happened to her? Maybe. My search history is going to look pretty sketchy, but writing always causes that. 

I really like building up the character of a missing person who disappeared long ago through various records and artifacts and accounts from various people. Actually Maureen Johnson did this very well in The Box in the Woods. Even if that was outrageously convenient and deus ex machina in about seventeen different ways and I hated the long rambly assemble the audience and explain everything part. Okay, that book had serious problems I could explore at another time. But I liked how we learned about the one girl through all the materials from the past and what people said in the present.

Look, if people say all these different things, which is true? "She ran off and left you as babies." "She disappeared, all right. That's all I'm saying." "I heard she moved to Switzerland. Is that not true?" "Why don't you ask Artledge down at the bait shop. He rents boats. He always said there was something about their relationship that was, well, I don't want to say fishy, that's hack. Something off."

So give those girls this mystery to solve WHILE they're dealing with sixteen years of emotional damage from evil aunts (not enough evil aunts in fiction, seriously--why is it always uncles?--aunt power!) and coping with this weird icicle father they don't know and being in a strange place and getting talked about by everyone AND trying to figure out how they even begin to relate to each other.

It's fun, that's the main thing. And we are constantly asking questions as readers, going, "That guy is definitely lying," or "This person is holding back," or "My goodness, people will tell Miss Marple anything." 

One thing that gets a tiny bit tedious is how Miss Marple always knows the answer but won't tell anyone. She's always doing that thing where she looks from one to the other and says, "Oh, well, it seems perfectly clear to me," and they all get baffled and annoyed and blunder around nearly getting murdered because she wouldn't come out and say it. Stop it, Miss Marple!

Ooh, another thing that completely freaked me out in Sleeping Murder is that they went to the same nursing home that Tommy and Tuppence went to in the extremely creepy book where they're older and Tuppence researches a painting and gets into this bizarre divided house by a canal and on and on. That book is so upsetting. By the Pricking of my Thumbs is the name of it. The same truly weird old lady says the same thing to Gwen that she says in that book. How bizarre and fun! It's a cameo from another book entirely. 

I can just picture the author laughing to herself as she did that, knowing how people would react. 

There's a character in my novel The Last Word who's loosely based on Agatha Christie, or at least she's not in the book but it's all about her and her series of books. The main character, Ceci, is just arriving back in America after being abroad for two years, living on a shoestring, searching for evidence about the Agatha Christie character's mysterious life. I kind of love that book, even if it's not the best thing I ever wrote. Maybe I'll read it again and see if it's worth putting out on KDP. There's so much I adore about that character and that story. Gothic houses! An amazing great-aunt! A wonderful boy! A best friend who's an insecure but astonishing artist! And of course a massive mystery that unfolds throughout the book. 

That's the first novel that I ever bashed into shape as a completed piece. I seem to remember it has some issues, but generally I remember the negatives more than the positives, so maybe I fixed them or they're not as bad as I think. Who knows?

Agatha Christie! So good! So strangely formative for me, even though I didn't read most of her books until last year, or was it the year before? I spent one whole summer reading through almost all of them. What I ought to do is reread each one the minute I finish it, so I can really learn how she structures things, since I'm generally baffled the whole way through. The Agatha Christie Writing Program. Make it so.

Rian Johnson: Glass Onion

I really wanted to see this. In fact, I watched Knives Out purely so I could see it fully educated in the ways of this series. Knives Out was fantastic, so tightly plotted that even my picky brain never found a single hole in the story. I loved it. I should watch it again.

Instead, I watched Glass Onion, then the next day kept thinking, "Wait..." and watched it again. And it has holes, alas. 

Spoilers going forward for both movies, probably, but definitely for Glass Onion.

There were a lot of things I adored about the movie. I loved that we thought we knew what was going on, then learned that we were seeing everything wrong. That was similar to Knives Out and was something I loved there, too. I loved the way we saw Whiskey very differently once Andi talked to her and got past the surface appearance. I loved all the various things that seemed completely different once we saw them from multiple angles. That's something Johnson does brilliantly. 

But there were plot holes. 

There was some hand-waving about how Miles cut Andi out of the company. That is just not how anything works. Two people who have equal partnership in a company, right? One can't just suddenly cut the other one out. And the stupid napkin is meaningless. It's set up as this PROOF that one or the other had the idea first, as if any court would be like, "Well, the napkin proves this or that." There has to be massive paperwork and legal protections and on and on. That's such a fundamental fatal flaw that the rest of the movie falls apart because of it.

The second major flaw is connected: it's that Miles would have any reason to kill Andi. Why? What does that accomplish? He already won the court case. In this world, another napkin suddenly proves that he's not the originator of the company? But he took it all away from her regardless of any napkins.

I cannot get over how idiotic the napkin thing is. It's just terrible. It's maybe a first draft idea, but should have been replaced with something from our reality that makes actual sense. 

I do love that Miles is extremely stupid and steals everyone else's ideas. That I buy 100%. 

I don't buy that Andi would let him in after he destroyed her life and took her company away, the company that she started. 

It makes no sense that he would kill her, as again it accomplishes nothing, and he takes her (fucking) napkin anyway. He has it, and he won already, so there is literally no reason to kill the person. He's also not a killer, in any way that we've seen so far. Maybe if he was seriously threatened, pushed to the absolute edge, but he wasn't. I could have imagined Duke, a violent person who carries a gun everywhere, pushed to murder by immense frustration or anger, but there was nothing to show Miles was like that. Poor characterization. 

He also had zero reason to kill Duke, especially in front of everyone. Look at the purported reasoning: Duke gets a Google alert on his phone that says Andi is dead. So, what does that mean? Miles looks super happy about it. Duke looks super happy about it. Now--inexplicably--it means Duke gets whatever [thing] that he's been wanting from Miles but Miles was holding back on. Why??? So Miles agrees to give him whatever the thing is (seriously, what is it?) and then instantly kills him. 

WHAT FOR?

To hide that Andi is dead? Everyone will get that information soon anyway.

Also, and this is the biggest plot hole: Miles killed, or tried to kill Andi, but then she walks up the dock and is there on his private island. He has an interesting reaction, a complex expression. He looks sad and moved and hopeful and I don't know what all else. He's a good actor to pull that off. I can't stand that actor, Edward Norton, but that's kind of why he's cast in this role, I think. He's so good at that smarmy self-aggrandizing sleazy smug bastard character. 

If I had tried to kill someone and they walked onto my private island, I would be highly on guard. I would imagine I'd be super tense. Right? I'd know that person knew a terrible thing about me. I'd know they were probably there for revenge or at minimum to tell everyone about that crime. But he never seems worried at all. Granted, he's dumb as a rock, but even he should be able to figure out that someone you tried to kill would be MAD AT YOU. Especially when it's Andi, who was already enraged at him for the whole stealing all her money thing. (It still makes no sense. What, she didn't have any money in the bank? She didn't own shares? There's just no way to make that work.)

This leads to the biggest twist, one that I don't even know is true. I mean, I believe it. I watched it twice to see whether my idea could be right. I'm sure it is. But I haven't seen it anywhere else. I tried reading the Reddit thread on the movie but since I deleted the app, reading it on a browser is (deliberately) so difficult and annoying that I bailed after a while. 

I don't think that's Helen. I don't think Andi died. Maybe she has a twin sister, sure, but I don't think that's her. I think it's Andi pretending to be Helen pretending to be Andi. 

They both have that down home accent, but Andi covers it up with her "dog ate the caviar" voice. They both can do that, as Helen proves. 

The person who receives and opens the box is the key clue here. Her hair is up in a towel wrap. I remembered it being Andi's short blond bob, but when I watched it a second time, her hair was covered. That's not accidental. That means it's obscuring which one of them it is. 

It's Helen who brings the smashed box to Benoit, but it makes no sense that Helen would even care about that box enough to smash it up, or would know Miles well enough to know what was in it. Helen believes her sister was murdered, but again there's no evidence for that and she had just lost everything. Suicide wouldn't be unheard of in that kind of situation. Helen's evidence is that the red envelope was nowhere in the house, but so what? It could be destroyed, or hidden really well. Andi lost it herself in her house until she was knocking over bookcases and it reappeared. 

I'm not even sure Benoit believes Helen is Helen. She has the long hair, but you can get around that easily. Frumpy clothes and different hair and a different accent and manner, sure. He could be going along with it to solve the attempted murder, even if he doesn't believe a real murder occurred. The thing about releasing a statement isn't a thing. If someone dies, that's public record. So when he says he can pull some strings and keep it from coming out--what? That's not a thing either. What strings? Where? Wait, so it would just come out anyway, based on that, but she needed to release a statement? That's contradictory.

Helen does not know these people well enough to interact with them the way she does throughout the whole movie. Just acting mad and aloof wouldn't do it. Granted they're all drunk the whole time. But when she gets into it with Duke, he says, "There she is. That's the Andi I know." That's because it is Andi the whole time. 

I'm also going by her vast rage at Miles and destruction of his company. That's Andi's kind of revenge, not Helen's. Helen is a third grade teacher, so smashing everything makes sense for her character, but Andi knows what will really hurt Miles and save lives all over the world and does that. Her actions show someone with a deep understanding of the Klear product that we only know as an audience because we've overheard people talking in the pool and elsewhere. 

She slips back into Helen's down home accent, but it's also Andi's original accent. 

Her Mona Lisa smile at the end seems to me enigmatic enough to imply there is a lot more going on than is on the surface. That's Andi. Helen is a character created by Andi who is scared of boats and terrified of the whole weekend among these rich fancy assholes. Andi is not.

Anyway, a friend and I are always saying that audiences these days are always looking for multiple levels beyond what are even there, so maybe I'm doing that, but given the contradictions about Andi/Helen throughout, I'm sure this is the case. And I like it that Benoit Blanc either doesn't know or doesn't care because he's interested in figuring out the case itself. He keeps saying he's very bad at stupid things--it's a running theme. One person pretending to be another seems like a stupid thing he'd be bad at. What other stupid things are there in the story for him to be bad at figuring out? There's a whole set-up with Among Us and crosswords and all these lesser puzzles that are not complex enough for him to be good at. 

There, solved it. 

But I'm mad about all the plot holes. Take second, third, and fourth passes at those things, seriously. You can call me. I'll read your thing and point out what parts don't actually work. (This is literally my job.) Mysteries are super hard. I know it. But a story can't only make sense when we don't know what's going on. This is exactly the same problem as with Nine Liars. It only hangs together when we don't know the ending. Once we know the ending, everyone including the police has to be outrageously stupid and incompetent for things to go the way they go. 

Speaking of which, wouldn't Helen go to the police? Wouldn't there be an investigation if she believes her sister was murdered? That gets into the news. Why does she think it's Miles or any of the shitheads at all? Again, she would have no reason to think that unless she was actually Andi and knew perfectly well who it was, just couldn't prove it and wanted her ridiculous plot point napkin back. 

I can buy a lot of nonsense in fiction. I watch shows over and over with enormous buys in them. Leverage! Agents of SHIELD! Community! I can suspend my disbelief! But I'm not okay with massive plot holes and things that make no logical sense that are supposed to be part of the actual way the world works. The ungodly stupid napkin thing and the corporate "legal thing" and two utterly unmotivated murders? That's quite a lot too much for me to buy. 

That movie was a lot of fun the first time around, though. Yo-Yo Ma was there! Serena Williams showed up! The setting was amazing! Miles is a great terrible villain, straight out of Despicable Me! These selfish, lazy people who are hanging around Miles for personal profit and gain are wonderful. Whiskey was a terrific character, as was Duke's mom. I liked how the shitheads were all full of self-loathing and had no spines at all, so they'd switch sides as soon as it was expedient. I liked how dumb and easy it was for Miles to hide Duke's phone (though again--WHY) by sticking it in his pocket. (Why not just turn it off and shove it in the couch? I swear, nothing makes any sense in this movie.) I loved how clueless Kate Hudson's character was. Perfectly believable to me. I've met so many of those people. I met a guy once who didn't believe in expertise and told me he thought he could do brain surgery. I met a recovering heroin addict who said she didn't want the Covid vaccine because she didn't know what was in it. But you'll shoot up things you buy from a guy under a bridge? Okay! People are full of misplaced confidence and ignorance and wildly inaccurate knowledge and super flexible ethics. I liked that about all the characters. 

I definitely want to watch Knives Out again, though. That was a great movie. The check to make as a writer is not: can I fool someone first time through, but once they know what's really going on, will they still think this makes sense? Doing it the first time only way is cheap and sketchy and honestly lazy writing.