Station Eternity

"First of all, I love Mur’s writing. And the thing that I particularly love about this book is that it explores one of the conceits of a standard cosy mystery… No one would ever go anywhere with Murder She Wrote ’s Jessica Fletcher, because there are dead bodies everywhere she goes. So Mur’s main character Mallory has this syndrome: everywhere she goes, someone gets killed. To deal with that, she takes refuge on a space station where there are no humans, to avoid getting anyone killed. And then, of course, someone comes to the station – and murder happens. So we have this great whodunnit . It’s a delightful romp. It has the witty banter that you want from this kind of thing. And then also, there’s her dealing with all of the baggage of having seen and witnessed so many deaths. I just thought it was a hoot, and had all the twists and turns that I wanted from a murder mystery . Definitely! I think that she plays fair – even with the science fiction that she has created, she presents it so you always have the knowledge you need before you get to doing the thing. I think all of the books that I’ve picked play fair. Yes. Dashiell Hammett talks about this – that there’s a difference between what he does, and what Agatha Christie was doing. With an Agatha Christie, the reader was meant to be able to figure it out. With a hard-boiled detective novel, it’s more about the mood and the tone – everything is supposed to be confusing and moving at a really rapid pace. So it’s starting to pick up some of that thriller vibe; you’re not supposed to be able to figure it out. In fact, when they were filming The Big Sleep , they got Chandler on the phone. They said, “We figured out who kills everybody else. But there’s this sixth death – who did that?” And he’s like, “I don’t know, doesn’t matter. It’s just there for the tone.” I watched the film, and I said, “So which was the murder that they didn’t know?” And my husband told me, and I realised – oh, yeah, that isn’t resolved at any point, is it? That doesn’t make any sense. But you just don’t care. There are! There’s more than one mystery happening in this, which is one of the things that I think I enjoy about it, and some of the additional mysteries are specifically science fiction based. Not just the whodunnit, but howdunnit and whydunnit."