Kristin Hughes (1974-2021)
13 books read for LibriVox
- Q, the young detective who tells this one, is good company, quick with a disguise and a little vain about it, and watching him worry at why a sewing girl vanished from a rich man's house is half the fun. Expect Victorian melodrama under the sleuthing, and enjoy it anyway.
- You get Wilde at his sharpest in the drawing-room sparring between Lord Goring and the dangerously composed Mrs Cheveley, while Sir Robert Chiltern’s spotless public image starts to crack. It’s funny, fast, and more forgiving about human weakness than its polished manners initially suggest.
- You get a brutal, strange study of pride and love, with Lear raging on the heath while his Fool keeps puncturing the grandeur. It’s bleak and sometimes deliberately difficult, but the language keeps opening up new depths each time you return to it.
- Beatrice and Benedick spend the whole play insulting each other so cleverly you'll want to read their scenes twice, and watching their friends trick them into admitting the obvious is pure pleasure. There's a nasty turn with Hero midway, but the comedy earns its way back.
- You get sharp, funny dialogue and a surprisingly prickly look at class, language, and who gets to remake whom. Eliza Doolittle is far more than Higgins’s experiment, and the play’s ending leaves you thinking about her independence rather than settling comfortably into a romance.
- You hear the dead of Spoon River speak from their graves, each brief epitaph exposing the grudges, compromises, lusts, and private tenderness their neighbors never saw. The voices contradict one another, so the town slowly becomes a messy human chorus rather than a neat moral lesson.
- You get Raffles, an elegant cricketer who spends his evenings burgling houses, while Bunny nervously narrates and helps him keep up the respectable façade. The stories are brisk, sly, and morally slippery, with just enough suspense to make you overlook how often you’re quietly rooting for theft.
- Raffles and Bunny again, but sadder and shabbier this time, both in hiding after everything went wrong, pulling jobs because it's all they know how to be. If you liked the first book's charm, this one trades some of it for melancholy, and it suits them.
- A cathedral close called Paradise, a stranger dead at the foot of an old stair, and a guardian whose past is locked tight. Fletcher's quiet English scene-setting does the real work; the mystery is serviceable, the town is the pleasure.
- You get a wonderfully melodramatic Gothic mystery, with hidden passages beneath the Paris Opera, a masked Erik, and Christine caught between fear, pity, and fascination. The narration can be delightfully over-the-top, but the underground atmosphere and Erik’s wounded loneliness linger after the thrills fade.
- Yes, the Winnie-the-Pooh man wrote a detective story, and it's exactly as good-humored as you'd hope: Antony Gillingham solving a country-house shooting mostly for fun, with his friend Bill playing Watson between rounds of billiards. Light and talky rather than dark, perfect rainy-afternoon stuff.
- You get Amory Blaine in all his charm, vanity, hunger, and confusion, stumbling through Princeton, romance, and the aftermath of war. The novel is uneven and sometimes wonderfully overstuffed, but its quick shifts in voice capture what it feels like to outgrow the person you thought you’d become.
- You get Viola’s clever, tender balancing act, Malvolio’s wonderfully sour self-importance, and a comedy that keeps slipping between farce and real loneliness. The mistaken identities can feel deliberately tangled, but the language is playful enough to reward reading aloud, especially when the characters are trying hardest to hide what they want.