[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think Christie assumed that anyone reading them would have enough French to get the jist of what he's saying.

At the time, that would have been a reasonable assumption in the circles Christie was most familiar with.

But that was then, this is now, educational and cross-cultural foreign language awareness standards have kind of changed, and characters no longer ejaculate* in public with quite so much abandon as they used to.

And now I'm kind of wondering how Christie's translators handle the issue, given that apparently she still has the best-selling and most-widely-translated books after the major religious texts and Shakespeare. Everything into the target language for the benefit of the non-francophone† Gentle Reader, or keep a few phrases around for flavour and if they happen to not be understood, well then zut alors!

Originally Posted by Luffy

Ellery Queen, in one book and in a particular chapter, spoke a lot of French, and he's an American, not French or Belgian. It was so over the top that a review I read moaned about the French phrases, something I've never seen Poirot readers do.

Yeah, it does seem that something which turned out to be unnecessarily pervasive (though I don't know how low/high the threshold for that from a presumably primarily monolingual US audience would be) and not subtly picked up in the rest of the following conversations/narrative to clue-in the reader (as one of my favourite authors, Barbara Hambly, does in her excellent and recommended Benjamin January series set in 1830s New Orleans where the characters speak multiple languages and often quote in Latin and Ancient Greek as well as French) would be pretty annoying.

And thanks to your comment, I just looked it up and found out that not only is Ellery Queen an actual writer (pseudonymous), but also was an actual detective (fictional). I'd known the former, but not the latter, and your phrasing made me think he'd inserted himself into some of his stories the way that Alfred Hitchcock used to do cameos in his films. Learn something new every day.

Anyway, finished Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast, 3rd in the Harry Hole series of dysfunctional Norwegian detective murder mystery/crime thrillers, and the first book in what the title of the omnibus calls "The Oslo Trilogy".

I liked this a lot more than The Snowman, not least because it involved a good deal of Norwegian history, and I tend to like to see historical stuff incorporated as means/motive/method for whodunnits, and also because I just don't really care for INSERT SLEUTH TYPE HERE vs psycopathically abnormal serial killer stuff. I have this rather low threshold for certain types of violence, fictional or otherwise, and gore in particular, which is why I don't read/watch most forms of horror.

Anyway, this was a much more straightforward hate crimes/potential revenge scheme-thwarting sort of investigation, which made use of the involvement of Norwegian volunteers to the WWII Nazi war effort, as well as the modern day neo-Nazi movement and general racial and anti-immigrant tension in Norway, as well as playing on fears of external foreign terrorism while examining the possibility of domestic terroristic activity.

Even though this was published and set circa 2000, those themes are actually pretty topical even now, what with the relatively recent Utøya spree killings which really rattled Norway's view of itself regarding certain undercurrents in its society.

Once again, this was really jumpy between all the flashbacks and the present-day stuff. And there was a lot of deliberate narrative misdirection with some hidden mysterious identity attempts, and on a few occasions, the use of identical names/nicknames to try and trick you into thinking that someone/thing was actually someone/thing else. Nesbø's favourite kind of fish must really be the red herring.

Despite this attempted obfuscation, I did manage to figure out both of the major people who were responsible for/committing the two intersecting crimes well before Harry did, or even the general only-shown-to-the-reader reveal. But then, he's a semi-dysfunctional borderline alcoholic with a lot of distractions in his life and I do have the benefit of being able to read even the purposefully mysterious hint-dropping-only segments of the primary criminal's internal reminisce.

Overall, this tied together a lot better, I think. One of the things which I thought was just a tangential introductory point to set up Harry's current situation and explain what he was doing in a particular position actually turned out to be quite thematically resonant with the case. Although I still think it's kind of overly coincidental the level of surprise personal involvement with his cases that he seems to be getting so far.

And a rather major loose end which I was expecting to see tied up (there were hints that it kind of would be) actually didn't, which I appreciate because you don't always get to wrap up everything neatly at the end, and I've started on the 4th book, Nemesis, to see if they return to investigating it, since I rather liked one of the characters who was affected by that and would like to see them get some form of justice.

Medium-firm recommend. I quite enjoyed this, mainly for the nifty Norwegian history/current culture bits, and there was an actual mystery to try to figure out, in terms of identity and what happened back then, if not what's going to happen now, as well as the obligatory race-against-the-clock can-we-stop-the-attempted-final-crime-in-time thriller portion.

* Well, maybe in the porno parody version. But that's generally a more non-conversational variety of intercourse than used to be societally acceptable.

† French translators tend to handle this sort of thing by doing footnotes with N.d.T. (note from the translator), with an explanatory gloss in the bottom margin should you need it.