Customer Reviews

Some Deaths Before Dying

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Very simply, this book should appeal to anyone who likes good fiction. It is so much more than a mystery -- perhaps a treatise on living and dying. One of the best books I've read in a long time -- and I've read a lot of good ones.

Peter Dickinson is a writer who couples great insight into human character with a quirky genius for special effects. This latter talent has been evidenced more in his wonderful childrens books over the last few years, than it has in his mysteries. No longer are apes the sole witness to horrendous crime; or households of somnulent children the background to sensitive explorations of life and death. In Dickinson's last two adult novels he has concentrated on the imagined lives of his characters, and they take central stage. I think these books are equally accomplished, though less pyrotechnic. I suspect I will return to them, perhaps more often through the years.

I urge any readers of Dickinson's adult works to try his children's books. Tulku is very fine, as is The Blue Hawk, Annerton Pit, The Dancing Bear, and Bone from a Dry Sea. The other children's books, such as the recent Kin series are equally wonderful, but are aimed at a generally younger audience.

Though ninety years old, Rachel Matson's mind remains as fully functional as it was when she photographed the world. Alas, the same cannot be said for her body, which is paralyzed and failing as death nears.

While watching a TV auction, a stunned Rachel sees an antique pistol that she gave to her now deceased spouse when he returned from being a Japanese POW during World War II. Rachel needs to know how a stranger placed her spouse's pistol on the sale block. Using her keen intelligence, Rachel begins to investigate. She starts by searching the old photographs that she took of her beloved and his regiment who were also held prisoner in the Pacific to see if a clue lies with one of them.

Peter Dickinson is more than just one of the masters of the English country mystery. He is one of the few grandmasters as his novels are always deep, entertaining, and original. SOME DEATHS BEFORE DYING clearly meets all three adjectives listed above. The story line is filled with depth as emphasized by a warm, wonderful, and unique amateur sleuth. The enjoyable novel is entertaining and will bring Mr. Dickinson a horde of new fans. No doubt original because only an author of Mr. Dickinson's talent could take a seemingly helpless individual and turn her into a dynamic detective within a realistic and exciting tale. The best seem to get better.

Harriet Klausner

Peter Dickinson is slowing down a bit, but all his unique talents are on display in "Some Deaths Before Dying." The book is his usual mix of mystery, psychological insight, and social history. The central character is an old woman, Rachel Matson, dying and paralyzed, who attempts to solve the central mystery of her life and marriage. A perennial bystander to life, Rachel is aided in her task by voluminous albums of photos she has taken throughout her life -- even at her own wedding!

The drama unfolds slowly as more characters are introduced and we learn more about Rachel, her family, and her husband Jocelyn. In the end, the mystery is solved and, while it proves to be appalling, one can't help be impressed by the intellectual ingenuity of Rachel's laborious reconstruction.

The characters are finely drawn; the novel itself was elegantly written and well-structured using the tricky flashback technique in which Dickinson excels. I was disappointed, however, in its moral emptiness. Ultimately Rachel was concerned only with knowing what happened, not in understanding the events and certainly not in forgiving anyone, either herself, her husband, and those who betrayed them.

He may surprise us yet and come back with another novel (for adults), but we've been waiting for 11 years, and his website has printed a discouraging remarks to the effect that, since no UK publisher got excited about this one, he simply wasn't going to bother any more.

Shame really, since Peter Dickinson was the greatest English crime writer working for decades on end, and while SOME DEATHS isn't as exciting as some of his earlier triumphs, I have just finished re-reading it for old time's sake, you might say, and I see in it all sorts of quiet beauties I missed before in 1999.

I was one of those readers who would line up at the bookstore door the day they said that Peter Dickinson had a new book! SOME DEATHS concerns an attorney, Jenny, in trouble with her own conscience at the law firm she works at. She has come into some information about a long-forgotten lawsuit which, if followed through in the course of justice, would bankrupt her firm and guarantee her own dismissal. Her husband, Jeff, is kind and sympathetic but he has job problems of his own. Until this crisis, Jenny and Jeff have been footing most of the bills for a firstclass retirement home for Jeff's uncle (or greatuncle?) Albert, a former career soldier who had been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Since the late 50s, Albert has been living with a secret that would torment a normal man, but he's OK with it.

Jenny has her own secrets. A rotten childhood was the sparkplug that led to the birth of two strange "multiple personalities," dramatic "Norma,"given to horrible rages that middleclass Jenny can't allow herself, and sober "Nurse Jenny," a personality she reverts to when things get uncomfortably personal. At its best, SOME DEATHS tells the story of how one woman, Jenny, learns from investigating an old crime, and in the process heals her own psychic wounds, eventually hoping to say goodbye to Norma and Nurse Jenny.

[SPOILERS AHEAD)

The book confuses me, however, on the level of its basic mystery. Are we to take it that Simon and Anne broke off their engagement solely on account of Jocelyn telling Simon that he and Simon's father had been lovers? This is what Rachel comes to believe, but I don't know, it didn't seem real to me. I think we are given clues (as in Nabokov's PALE FIRE) to the actual solution of the mystery, one that the author refrains tastefully from elucidating. And I figure it's an incest secret, and that the young lovers have found out (or maybe just Simon) that he was Jocelyn's son and therefore Anne's brother--or vice versa, that Anne is the daughter of the loathsome Fish, which would give the story that added edge since spparently this must be the trauma that Rachel has all these years blacked out, and her photographs assist her in remembering it at last. "I had the baby of Fish Spadding--ugh!" I don't know, readers, what do you think?

In Peter Dickinson's "Some Deaths Before Dying," the amateur sleuth is completely paralyzed -- bedridden and pretty much waiting to die. This could have been a tedious and even dispiriting book to read, but it didn't turn out that way at all. This is a very good mystery but also a wonderful, touching story on many other levels.

At first the mystery seems fairly simple, almost insignificant. How did a dead man's gun wind up on the "Antiques Road Show" in the company of a strange young woman? But this little mystery in turn leads to revelations about much bigger crimes and ever more shocking plot twists.

The reader is definitely made to empathize with bedridden sleuth Rachel Matson and her urgent need to resolve a crime long covered up. Rachel was a talented photographer and a fairly independent woman in her youth (during World War II). She's a sturdy, no self-pity allowed type, so the reader isn't put off by by her predicament. Rather, you find yourself fascinated by her determination to find out what really happened to the gun and to make peace with her own relatively small part in the cover-up.

There are wonderful character studies throughout the book - Rachel's is foremost of course, but the secondary characters are also wonderfully alive and three-dimensional. Beyond the mystery to be solved is the story of Rachel's love for her husband, and of the secrets the two of them were forced to keep throughout their lives. A moving, haunting and well-told tale.

I have been reading Peter Dickinson's books for 20 years and with the exception of the last two have enjoyed and appreciated them all. But SOME DEATHS...reads as if written by some fussy, silly old British upper middle class woman who hasn't had any outside communication since 1959. The pace is deadly slow and just dull at times as the narrative winds forward and back in time and from one annoying character after another. Between daughter Flora nattering on and on to saintly nurse Dilys and stiff-upper dead Jocelyn, not one character has any originality or life. This is a very disappointing book when compared with TEFUGA or A PERFECT GALLOWS. Read the earlier novels to understand was an excellent writer Mr. Dickinson really is.