喜鵲謀殺案讀後感 含劇透

     I just finished the book.  I borrowed from library a couple months ago but did not finish it.  For some reasons, I kept thinking about it.  So I went to library trying to borrow it.  However, I'd already forgot the name, so I went to the circular desk and ask the librarians.  I told two young librarians, I am looking for a book I borrowed before.  I wonder if they could find it in my account.  They said the system does not hold such records.  So they started to ask me about the book.  I described the book as one of the staff's pick a couple months ago.  It's a detective story, red cover, the title contained some birds.  They both immediately said, Magpie Murders!  It was kind funny.  I got the book right away.  

    I really like the book.  I think it was quite engaging.  The way it presented itself was quite unusual.  A story within a story.  Both stories are engaging.  But at the end, when the first story finally finished, it was quite powerful for me.  Because the characters are all different now.  They took on a new meaning from the second story, especially for the characters from the first story were based on real person in the second story.  Even when I writing this afterthought, I found it a bit confusing to describe the plot...  

There're a lot of reference to the Agatha Christie novels, but I haven't even read one of her novels.  

I am kind comparing this one to the the Ganache series.  I felt this one is more grounded.  The characters were written in a more realistic way.  Because a lot of time, I find characters in Ganache series a bit like caricatures.  

I feel like the author really paid a tribute to the genre both for written words and TVs with this book.  Because the amount of reference for both media are a lot.  

I never see answers in neither stories, but the most surprising was the first story.

I saw some interviews with the author, he said his idea came from ArthurConanDoyle.    ACD hated Holmes so much, he wanted to kill the character off.  And apparently, a lot of author, including Agatha as well hated their own creations.  This gave author the idea for this book.  When I saw those interviews.  I thought it was indeed the case, the book wrote extensively about the relation with author and his own creation.  I guess it's why the ending for the first book was so appealing to me.  Author lives through their creations.  And yet, when it was demanded of them to use the same character, it became a grind, even debasing their ideals.  It was kind sad.  

I knew this book has a Chinese translation.  So I went and read some reviews.  Most of them said the same thing, bad translation and editing ruined the whole thing, both Mainland'sandTaiwan's version.  It was a shame.  But I would think this is a very hard book to translate, because it really has lots of references to classic mystery novels.  Plus I think it's so very British.  So unless the translator is really familiar with both Britain and classic mystery novels, it would is really difficult to do justice.  I only read it through 1 time, but I know I could only understand less than half of the contents, maybe even less...  

But even so, I could not put down the book once passed the opening scenes.  

Now  to think about it.  It was so weird that the victim was so disliked by everyone.  That made his death less sympathetic for the readers.  And yet, while I was reading it, I could not put it down.