Finished another Koontz today—Hideaway. I’m not going to review it, because I’ve done so many Koontzes, but I’ll mention that I liked it a lot, yet found it hard to read. I liked the good characters so much that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them, so I actually resisted picking it up a few times, not wanting to know what happened next.
Joan Hunter Dunn died last week. She was the subject of the English poet John Betjeman’s most famous poem, “A Subaltern’s Love Song.” Betjeman asked her permission to use her name, and apparently they were only friends, not lovers.
The poem (I’ll confess I’ve never read it) is a wartime elegy to normal life and love in pre-war times.
Betjeman was a pupil of C. S. Lewis’ at Oxford. He never took his degree, and always blamed Lewis for not supporting him when he got into academic trouble. They were reconciled in later years, but never became friends.
If you know anything about Btejeman you’ll know why they weren’t lovers. (You don’t want to know, believe me.)
I bought Odd Thomas a while back, have only flipped through it a bit, and I already have a beef against Koontz. On page 2-3, he reveals a twist, if not the conclusion, to Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” which I’ve wanted to read for years. Terrible. It’s my fault really, but still woe to the one who reveals the plot twist of a classic, yet-to-be-read story.
I think it’s generally agreed at this point in time that anyone who already doesn’t know how The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ends has only himself to blame. I’ve never read it myself, but I know what the twist is.
Or are you joking?
No, I’m not joking about being a little bummed by the revelation. Similar to watching a little movie joke on Harry Potter 6. I didn’t know it would be a spoiler, but that was the point of the joke. Still, it is my fault for not reading the Christie story, I guess.
But now that I’m talking about it, I didn’t know anything about “And Then There Were None” or “Mousetrap” until I saw the plays. No, I read the book on the first one before seeing the play, but still, no spoiler from someone who thought everyone already knew it beforehand.
Are there any other spoilers I should know?
Getting back to film noir, do you know anything about “M”?
No. I’ve never seen it.