31 October, 2001: Some Deaths Before Dying
One of Peter Dickinson's great strengths as a writer is his ability to offhandedly create entirely fictional details that don't seem fictional at all. One of his mysteries, Sleep and His Brother, lays out an perfectly plausible childhood medical syndrome upon which the plot rests; another, The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest deals with African tribesmen living with an anthropologist in England. It's a shame that this talent is wasted in Some Deaths Before Dying. The premise is rather intriguing -- an elderly, bed-ridden British woman sees an antique gun (one of a set of dueling pistols her late husband owned, which she believed to have been safely stowed away decades ago) on "Antique Roadshow" and begins leafing through her numerous photo albums and reconstructing its history and that of her husband. But none of the revelations are particularly surprising, and Dickinson's invention could have been done away with, as it is (for all intents and purposes) the Bataan Death March. Further, while I'm not necessarily familiar with the milieu of homes for convalescent children and I cannot be familiar with a fictional tribe, fiction and movies have made me more than familiar with upper-class British life in the '40s and '50s. A pleasant timewaster of a book from an author who usually does much better.