Customer Reviews

Murder on the Cliffs (Daphne du Maurier, Book 1)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Last night I dreamt I went to Padthaway again. And once was more than enough, believe me!

This is dreadfully written. It's thoroughly BAD. Capital letters are intentional here. It's textbook BAD. Here is yet another example of a book that had an absent editor. What on earth do editors do these days anyway? Does the quality of the writing even matter? Is the popular fiction market made up of nothing but this gimmicky drivel? Here are some examples of the atrocious writing you will suffer through should you attempt to read Murder on the Cliffs:

SINS #1, 2, 3 & 4 : POOR PUNCTUATION, AWKWARD SYNTAX, REDUNDANCY and ODD WORD CHOICES
"An impossibility, for the Lady Hartleys of this world did not mix with those considered belowstairs and Ewe, as a former professional nurse, exuded the working tab abhorrent to her ladyship."
[Incoherent. Remove the clauses and it makes no sense. Therefore, badly punctuated. Proof of an absent or lazy (or incompetent?) editor. A "professional" nurse as opposed to an "amateur" nurse? The book is littered with redundancies like this.]

SIN #5: RUN-ON SENTENCE MANIA, OVERUSE OF FANCY VERBS RATHER THAN USING THE WORD SAID
"Oh she's always been willful," divulged Ewe in a confessional manner to her good friend Mrs. Penmark after Ewe had shepherded me out of the cottage for our afternoon visit to a baker's wife."
[Every other line of dialogue in the book is followed by similar run-on sentences rather than making it a completely separate sentence as it should be. Characters don't talk in this book, they "divulge" and "translate" and "squawk" and "summon" and "warn." They "warn" quite often - about every three pages or so.]

SIN #6: PURPLE PROSE
"All around, water trickled from a series of white Greek mythological fountains, the dark stone cobbled flooring winding itself through a maze of massive potted plants placed at strategic points for circular harmony."
[I'd call Challis' writing style Fuchsia Fiction rather than Purple Prose.]

SIN# 7: THE HUH? SENTENCE
"Having entered the house without a backward glance, Lady Hartley had assumed I'd follow, but Sir Edward had a different plan."

I thought this was a novice writer's debut. But guess what? Challis has written four other novels all of them Gothic romances. I can only suspect that they have been published by a vanity press. The story is a knock-off of du Maurier's far superior masterpiece Rebecca. This can be the only reason it has been published. Another gimmicky historical mystery that will hopefully make a bit of cash for St. Martin's Press. And that is the reason I wanted to read this book. I think Rebecca has one of the best villainess characters in all of mystery fiction. So I kept waiting for Mrs. Trehearn to be this book's Mrs. Danvers. But Trehearn barely appears in what I managed to read. She must get her big scenes later in the book and I gave up around page 80. Instead I had to endure a precocious 15 year-old girl (supposedly emotionally disturbed but I never got that) teaming up with 21 year-old du Maurier. They bored me. So did Lady Hartley, Sir Edward, Lord David - clearly the Maxim de Winter knock-off who broods and sulks like a pre-adolescent. I especially loathed Ewe Sinclaire with her cliché working class dialect and idioms and her irritating habit of calling everyone by their initials (Sir E, Mrs. B, etc.). And seriously... Ewe? The female sheep? Who on Earth names anyone Ewe? Even for a fictional character it's an absurd choice! There is another character called Perony Osborn. Since this book is in the mode of a 1960s Paperback Library Gothic I guess these kinds of character names are to be expected. I kept rolling my eyes.

Avoid this book as you would an infectious disease. I predict this book will be in the remainder piles by Spring 2010.

I've read a lot of bad mysteries. Often, I abandon them after the first ten pages. This is the first mystery I ever kept reading because I was morbidly fascinated by just how poorly it was written. I can't believe Minotaur published this book! Is the author blackmailing someone at the company? I laughed out loud several times while reading this compilation of basic writing errors. Misplaced modifiers, bizarre word choice, inconsistent and inexplicable behavior by the characters, historical anachronisms, nonsensical dialogue, plot holes--this book has *everything.*

Fortunately, I got this book from a library; I would have felt cheated had I spent a nickel on it at a garage sale.

I could not get past the first chapter and have learned that if an author can't get it right by then it's time to quit.
Really purple prose, way too many adjectives, "the sacred beauty of the house" (this is the first time she sees it).
Jane Austen it isn't.
Others will love it I'm sure but not me.

I can't believe I slogged through this awful book but the library was closed and I had to read something. Just as many other reviewers have said, the writing could be used in a college writing class as an example of how NOT to write. But in addition, there were inconsistencies in the story--like when Lianne says "she was alive last night" and you scratch your head and go back to check and she was actually killed two days ago and Lianne knows that--huh? I should've stopped there. So I returned it to the library but stuck a post-it note on the first page warning readers and directing them to Amazon reviews before they invest any time on this dreadful pap.

Twenty-year-old Daphne du Maurier goes on vacation to research the town's history. One day, she encounters a young woman standing over a dead body. The woman identifies the body as that of her brother's fiancee. Speculation abounds. Is it suicide or murder? If it's the former, why would she want to kill herself? And if it's the latter, who would want her dead and why? There are motives, of course. Victoria, the dead woman, used to be a kitchen maid, and her betrothal hadn't been accepted. So all we have to do as readers is take in the not-so-subtle clues throughout this train wreck.

Never in my life have I seen such bad writing. Well, maybe I have, but when you use a talented author's name for a book, you expect something at the very least presentable. Not so in this book. The purple prose is horrible, the dialogue laughable, and the "twist" predictable. But that's beside the point. The heroine in this story is NOT Daphne du Maurier. She may have the same name, but it is not Daphne. Didn't this author read du Maurier's bio? The author of this book made Daphne sound like Mrs. de Winter. What a lost opportunity to flesh out the real life enigmatic author. Do you want something well written that is based on Daphne du Maurier? Read DAPHNE instead. Skip this if you know what's good for you.

I bought this book from a book club as one of my required purchases; and since I paid for it, I forced myself to finish it. But it took me a long time to get through it because it was so boring. The characters were so unbelievable, as was the plot. The ending was predictable and disappointing. I won't pass this one along to my friends. I would put it in the recycle bin, but I suppose Goodwill can get $1 for it, so for that it gets one star.

This has to be the worst book that I've started to read in a very long time, the only one that rates so poorly is another book by the same author. MURDER ON THE CLIFFS sounded good in a review (not Amazon) so I bought it and an earlier book by Ms Challis. What a mistake and what a waste of money! I started the other book first but did not finish it; I hoped that MURDER ON THE CLIFFS would be better. It isn't, and I didn't finish it either. I'm reluctant to give either book to the local Library for the free shelf because someone might actually think that these are how mysteries are meant to be written.

The reviews of MURDER ON THE CLIFFS on Amazon, particularly the negative ones which I should have read before puchasing, barely scratch the surface of how poorly written this book really is. Further no one has commented about Ms Challis's use of Daphne du Maurier's name, some of her characters and places (thinly veiled) and even circumstances of her life. This should qualify as identity theft as well as theft of intellectual property. I'm surprised that the estate of Daphne du Maurier hasn't sued; they should. While the writing is truly awful (plot, characterization, descriptions, development of story, grammar, syntax, etc.), the editing -- or lack there of -- is even more egregious. How did this book get published? How did any of her books get published? Don't waste your money on buying them, or the proposed sequel to MURDER ON THE CLIFFS. Ms. Challis should not be encouraged.

I wouldn't give this book even one star but the system won't work unless you do.

I WANTED to like this book. I TRIED to like this book. But, in the end, I had to force myself just to finish it. Murder on the Cliffs is god-awful: filled with purple prose, loaded with anachronisms large and small, peopled by unappealing characters, and burdened by an uninteresting plot. Whatever induced Minotaur/St. Martin's Press to accept this for publication?

Picking up on the current popularity of historical mysteries set between the wars, Murder on the Cliffs introduces readers to a young and callow "fictional" Daphne du Maurier. Author Joanna Challis may well be aping Nicola Upson's successful Josephine Tey mysteries which are well-written and engrossing. But the comparison ends after knowing that, while both have successful real-life writers as heroines, Challis forgets the fun of novels of this sort are in the period details and literary foreshadowings of the characters' real work. Instead she fills her book with inaccuracies and anachronisms. Some are minor: for instance, she misuses words all the time, like referring to a "photographer" as a "cameraman" when no such animal existed in du Maurier's time outside a movie studio. Some of her errors are just stupid: like using "bribe" when she means "blackmail." But many are major. At one point she describes a dinner party where the the family housekeeper and cook sit down with the nobility as guests. But the topper is her major plot device that a kitchen maid be generally accepted as the fiancée of an English lord and that said fiancée moves into his country house (a la Manderly) before the wedding. All this occurs presumably in the hidebound, class-ridden 1920s.

And the writing! Oh my, the writing. Much can be forgiven if an author has a felicitous turn of phrase or a love of words. But Challis has neither. What can one do with a novel where on the first page an author has her main character musing: "I could never resist the allure of dark, swirling clouds...or a view of the sea, its defiant nature stirred up...It is not a lie to say I felt drawn out that day, led to a certain destiny"?

The answer, I advise, is don't read it. As Challis herself might say, "Had I but known the linguistic catastrophe awaiting me, I would have secreted this cantankerous tome in the priest hole next the monk's skeleton."

I have read hundreds of crime stories. I have read many, many murder stories set in England but written by people who plainly don't live there, books that are full of (often hilarious) mistakes. I have read most of Daphne du Maurier's books, and many books which take up the story of another work of fiction or a real-life character. Some of these books were good, some were bad.

This book needs a whole new category: It is by far the worst murder story I have ever read. This book is dreadful. It is indescribably bad, but I will try to give some evidence. The writer can't write (she frequently gets words wrong, doesn't know the difference between imply and infer, doesn't know what plethora means, can't construct a sentence), knows nothing about England, Cornwall, the 1920s, etiquette, the system of titles. The names are all wrong - Windemere (sic) in Cornwall. Characters called Ewe and Perony (Perony is a 'school madam'...), while the dead Lord is called Terry. I suppose someone told the author that a Cornish village might be based on fishing. This has been transposed into a 'shipping company', with the young man of the village (Connan) wearing a uniform, and working on a ship, at the docks, which can't be reached by walking or train - the boys from the village are taken there by boat. (All this is completely impossible, in case it isn't clear.) There is an Abbey which has been there since the time of Charlemagne. The religion is not specified (no Catholic convent could have such a history in the UK, but non-Catholic denominations do not have such communities), but apparently the author is unaware of the Dissolution of the Monasteries - there simply are no religious foundations of this kind in England with a continuous history. It is as wrong as if she put such an historical abbey in Australia or the USA. Even if it were possible, it seems that the author has never visited a convent, has no idea of how such a place would have operated in the 1920s.

This book is mind-boggling. The author can't have even tried to work any of it out in her own head, let alone write it in a way to sound convincing. I started underlining the problems, the mistakes, the infelicities but had to give up. I continued reading (although the plot was simultaneously ludicrous and completely guessable - quite an achievement. Spoiler: once a certain character appeared on the scene, it was obvious whom the heroine was going to end up with, so obvious how another character would be eliminated) out of sheer horrified fascination. There is a wonderful book called My Little Blue Dress where the oddnesses in an unreliable memoir gradually get worse and worse till a whole other layer of the story is revealed - I did wonder if that was going to be the secret of this book. Sadly no. I bought it in part because I have faith in Minotaur/ St Martins. I cannot imagine what they are doing publishing this book. Two editors seem to be named - it seems hard to believe anyone else was involved, this reads like a vanity publication, unchecked and uncared for.

I am glad I didn't read the reviews here first or I probably never would have read this book. The writing style is certainly different from your average murder/mystery but that doesn't make it bad. It has enough interesting characters and plot turns to keep your interest. Give it a try - you might like it.