Wednesday, 11 December 2024

Chandos Books

See Dornford Yates. Also here and here.

There are eight listed Chandos Books:

Blind Corner
Perishable Goods
Blood Royal
Fire Below
She Fell Among Thieves
An Eye For A Tooth
Red In The Morning
Cost Price

Richard Chandos is the central character and narrator of every volume. However, Red In The Morning is a sequel to Gale Warning which also features Chandos and his friend, Jonathan Mansel, as major characters. Furthermore, the later Ne'er-Do-Well is narrated by Chandos and also features both him and Mansel. Thus, there are ten volumes with Chandos in them. These ten divide into a five-volume "Hanbury" sequence and a five-volume "Jenny" sequence.

Chandos and George Hanbury were friends before they met and accepted the leadership of the older Mansel in Blind Corner. Hanbury, Hanbury's wife and Chandos' first wife have died at the beginning of She Fell Among Thieves but Chandos meets and marries Jenny who appears in subsequent volumes, including Gale Warning and Ne'er-Do-Well. Thus, Blind Corner is a beginning, We Fell Among Thieves is a turning point and Ner-Do-Well is a conclusion.

The Chandos series is a sequence of sequels:

Perishable Goods is a sequel to Blind Corner;

Fire Below is a sequel to Blood Royal;

An Eye For A Tooth turns out to be another sequel to Blind Corner, set immediately after the first novel, thus with Hanbury still alive;

She Fell Among Thieves is a sequel to the "Hanbury" sequence;

the last two novels feature Jenny and thus are sequels to She Fell Among Thieves;

Red In The Morning is a sequel to Gale Warning and also to Adele And Co.;

Cost Price is a sequel to Safe Custody.

Sunday, 31 March 2024

A Criticism Of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

See also Three Criticisms Of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Lisbeth Salander is convinced that there is a connection between Zalachenko and Bjurman and therefore sets out to find evidence for such a connection because she has no such evidence as yet in which case why is she so convinced that there is a connection? This is a contradiction. We, the readers, do not initially notice the contradiction because we already know that there is a connection between Zala and Bjurman and we expect Salander to be on the trail but she has to have something to start with. Knowing that Zala is involved with prostitution, knowing that prostitution involves bikers and learning that Bjurman has met someone who then met a biker, she might start to hypothesize a connection between Zala and Bjurman but at that stage it would only be a hypothesis. In terms of the plot, she has to mention a (possible) Zala-Bjurman connection to Dag in order to set in motion the murders of Bjurman, Dag and Mia.