Customer Reviews

Blood on the Dining Room Floor: A Murder Mystery

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I read _Blood on the Dining Room Floor_ a couple months ago, during a time when I read almost nothing but sharp, hardboiled pulp detective stories. I might suggest that method -- read some old Sam Spade shorts (contemporary with Stein's writing of this little gem), then read this book, then go back.

Where Hammett and company's tales are sharp, grittily realistic, and driven by swarthy melodramatic plots, Stein's one mysterious foray into the Murder Mystery genre has little discernible plot, is distinctly un-swarthy, lacks melodrama, and for these reasons is perhaps far more realistic than Hammett et al. are held to be; _Blood_ clearly reflects the confusion we (I) feel in the face of traumatic events... the mind reels before the reality (which always lacks cliche and melodrama) of violence and leaves one (me) with nothing but an almost incoherent froth of language in one's (my) head, out of which occasionally bubble moments of "clarity": bits of facts and/or memories of incidents and characters which may or may not be accurate. Sometimes, too, the froth dissolves into moments of almost ritual invocation: "Lizzie do you understand do you understand lizzie": the mind reaching out to (hi)stries of past violence (the fall river axe murders, lizzie borden) to unsuccesfully but compulsively try to order and give meaning to the violence at hand.

Dazzling. The full effect of this book (the composition of "my take" on it which appears above) came only after weeks of letting the book sit in the back of my mind, as I moved back to pulp detective stories and on to other things.

It is classic Stein, a pure uncut jewelled antidote to the false-feeling closures of the usual mystery novel and the journalistic, faux-objective treatments of the violent throughout fiction, film, and (dare I mention) TV. A true refuge for the "thinking" person.