I usually have a problem with short stories. The problem is
that they are short! All too often I am just getting into the story when
suddenly they’re done and I’m sitting there going, but, but, but I’m not ready
to leave yet.
Having said that Sleep No More by P.D. James is a little
toothsome chocolate box of the best bitter chocolate you could hope for as a
present. It’s no coincidence that there are chocolates on the book cover, or at
least there are in my version.
The book is subtitled ‘six murderous tales’, and that kind
of sums things up. As the back cover says, “When it comes to crime, it’s not
always a question of ‘who dunnit?’ Sometimes there’s more mystery in the why or
the how.” It is this variation – the different flavours and different
approaches to each murderous tale that makes this little collection work so
well. For example, in some cases we know the murderer straight away, and even
the why, but what is fascinating is the aftermath. And of course sometimes there’s
something incredibly satisfying about the twist in the tale.
All of the short stories in this collection are deceptively
simple. I think it’s the art of a good crime writer to make things seem
effortless so you don’t notice their slights of hand. As someone who used to
string words together for a living, pre-retirement, I wanted to dismantle all
these stories and try to work out exactly how they were constructed and just it
is that makes them go down so smoothly and yet taste so wonderfully bitter. But
to try to deconstruct them would be to take away the magic, so I’ll just sit
back and appreciate these delightful, twisty examples of a great writer
offering up six very elegant examples of her craft.
Sleep No More by P. D. James was published in 2017 and my
copy was published by Vintage Canada.
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