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4.0 out of 5 stars
Southern Mystery and more, April 10 2004
These are stories about Gavin Stevens, county attorney or Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Some are well written crime mysteries, while other's look at a more general human mystery. "Smoke" has Stevens employing a theatrical device as clever as Sherlock Holmes (in Scandal in Bohemia) to illicit an end to the mystery. Monk contains deductions about the "moron" Monk, and what he could or could not do. The characterizations of the minor characters are all well done. The stories "Tomorrow" and "Knights Gambit" go beyond conventional crime detection. Knights Gambit, the longest piece, unfolds around a chessboard, and is more complicated. With Faulkner's elaborate sentence structure, I had trouble following some of this story.. perhaps a little too mysterious.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Modernist Murders, Sep 6 2002
Readers familiar with William Faulkner - and those who are not averse to unconventional sentences - will enjoy this collection of detective stories featuring Gavin Stevens as county attorney in small town Mississippi, and his young nephew Charles as assistant. Stevens, an intriguing character who translates the Bible into Greek and plays chess with his nephew, is an interesting mix of the traditional European detective and a southern gentleman who can communicate and empathize with the local townspeople. As well as crime solving, these stories also offer a unique and vivid portrait of the South of the forties that Faulkner captures through his characteristically tactile and vernacular use of language and shifting narrative perspective. The impoverished farmers that persist, ageless and enduring, the occasional urban outsider or foreigner, and the rich landowner of mysterious circumstances, are some of the characters that populate these stories. Tradition, inheritance, and the looming presence of war shape Faulkner's candid and non-sensational rendering of this microcosm and his tacit exploration of time and mortality.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
An enjoyable minor work, Jul 13 2000
Despite the fact that I have a degree in literature, I've never been a Faulkner worshiper. His technique, while admittedly masterful, is something I often find to be self-conscious and distracting. That said, Knight's Gambit is my favorite Faulkner book because it is not typical Faulkner; only the title story, which ends the book, has those recognizable long-winded sentences and that rambling style. No one will mistake this for one of his major works, and as mysteries these stories really don't work very well, but what these stories DO have is atmosphere and good characterization. Gavin Stevens, an almost unbelievable reservoir of wisdom and good ol' common sense, is in each of these stories our guide into a treacherous, hardscrabble and sometimes brutal world that, if you have ever spent any time in the rural South, you will recognize immediately. The mysteries themselves, as I said, are not very impressive, but the characters and situations are all well-observed and guaranteed to lodge in the brain after you've finished reading the book. Flawed but memorable, and highly recommended for those who are either weary of Faulkner or would like to read some of his lesser-known but worthwhile work.
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