Book # 148 & Mystery Book # 8 - The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Ahhh.... The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler  - one of my favorite books. Rereading it was so much fun. This is the first book in the Phillip Marlowe series and it is the defining classic of the hard boiled detective genre. Chandler describes things like no one else... here's a link to some of the best lines from the book https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1222673-the-big-sleep.  There are some classic lines in there...

The plot involves Marlowe investigating a blackmail case which quickly escalates to multiple murder cases involving a whole bunch of criminals all around Los Angeles. What I hadn't noticed the first time I had read it is that one of the murders is actually never solved and Marlowe seems to forget all about it by the end. Apparently Chandler was asked about this when they were preparing the script for the movie and Chandler hadn't realized his mistake! So who killed the chauffeur? We'll never know.  It is the kind of book where the details of the plot aren't the most important thing to keep track of...

This book stays in my top 50 of all time... I highly recommend it even if you really aren't all that into mystery books. A+.

Mystery Book # 30 -Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

For a spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a bit boring but overall okay. Maybe having seen the movie ruined it a bit for me since I knew how it ended. It is basically about a former spy having to return to duty to investigate his former division to see which of the head members is actually a Russian mole. There really isn't that much action... most of the book is the main guy Smiley reading through old papers and interviewing people. He's described as an old short fat guy too... so this isn't a James Bond type of adventure. I'll give it a B.

Mystery Book # 98 - The Steam Pig by James McClure

The Steam Pig starts out promisingly. The book is set in South Africa and was written during the 1970's so it has a pretty unique setting for a mystery book. The main characters are a white cop, Kramer, and his African assistant, Zondi. Together they solve crimes and have to deal with apartheid in every aspect of their lives. But besides the initial premise of the series, the book doesn't have much else going for it. The crime they have to solve is pretty routine (the murder of a young woman) and most of the secondary characters are fairly uninteresting. Even the eventually revealed motive for the murder isn't that unique. It wasn't a bad book though... just average. C+

Mystery Book # 87 - The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald

The Dreadful Lemon Sky is the 16th book in the Travis McGee series which is about a guy that lives on a boat and solves mysteries. My main question is how does a guy that lives on a boat have so many adventures to have at least 16 books? This time an old friend of Travis' dies in a suspicious accident and he sails his boat to the area where his friend lived and proceeds to investigate. And of course the mystery ends up involving other people that also live on boats. I'm sure in a months time I'll remember almost none of the plot, but at least it was mildly diverting. C+