I’m pinging back and forth between loving and hating Elden Ring. My overall vibe is one of love, obviously, but the things I hate about it are congealing with time. In part because they haven’t changed over time. If anything, they’ve just gotten worse. It’s my age-old complaint about, well, everything in media. Things don’t change. That’s part and parcel from anything.
Let me explain. I read mystery series. I’ve read thousands of mysteries over my years, and that’s not an exaggeration. Well, maybe one thousand, so a slight exaggeration. One thing I noticed is that most series were really good for seven or so books, then just went downhill from there. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the alphabet murders. No, that’s not the name of the series, but it is how they are defined. “A” is for Alibi, “B” is for, uh, Bullets? “C” is for, er, Clues? All the titles are crime-related, in case you hadn’t guessed. Google tells me that “B” is for Burglar and “C” is for Corpse. It was written from the first-person perspective by Sue Grafton, and the protagonist was Kinsey Millhone, a female PI. Now, in 2022, that might not seem like a big deal. The first book was published 40 years ago, though, and it was a huge deal–even by the time I started reading them, which was roughly a decade later.
She was a hard-drinking, hair-chopping broad who was good at her job and bad at relationships. She lived with her 80+-year-old landlord who she claimed she would marry/jump in a heartbeat. She was hard-bitten, but, yes, had a good heart. She was a fucking revelation, and I devoured every book in the series.
One of the gimmicks of the series is that each book is taking place in real time with in relation to the last book. So the entire series is set in the ’80s, which is….an interesting choice. For the first dozen or so books, it worked really well. But “M” is for Malice was the last book in the series that I really enjoyed, and that was published in 1996. After that, though, it felt as if Grafton started reaching for material. Part of it was the real-time feel of the books because well into the next millennium, she still had no cellphones and other useful technology in her books.