Who Cases!

Slim pickings at Goodwill lately, and it's been that way for a while. I could have done all my Christmas shopping already if people I know want Football Stars of 1998 or Windows 95 For Dummies. But they don't.

Today is kind of a lazy Saturday, Dad day Eve, cleaning and shopping done, the Cubs on TV and the weather warm and cloudy. There was an Agatha Christie at the Goodwill a few weeks ago -- the only one quite some time -- and I've figured out that she is my literary equivalent of a nice lazy day: not challenging, like, say, Saul Bellow (or even as much as PD James); but not annoying, like that Artemis Fowl or the one I'm currently reading. That one is by Ron Hansen, who was a year ahead of me at Creighton, and whom I've never read before, and who has a very fine reputation.

Wow, there was a flurry of correct who cases!

The Christie book was And Then There Were None, which was originally called Ten Little Indians, and I assume it was changed because, well -- Ten Little Indians. Ten people are lured to an island, and one by one they die. There really was no possible way to identify the killer, and the book could have ended with all its readers frustrated, had not a fishing trawler found, long after the fact, a confession in a bottle floating on the sea. The only problem I had was the nagging feeling after each death, that the next death could have been avoided if the characters acted like normal people instead of as inevitable victims. There were many reasons they couldn't get off the island and, as I said, no way to identify the killer. So they spent all their energy trying to identify the killer rather than figuring out what was going to happen next -- which had been conveniently written out for them in the poem "The Little Indians".

Other than that, unchallenging fun. Happy summer.