Murder She Wrote 2: Hooray for Homicide

There’s just something about old books. It’s like their crinkled covers and yellowing pages tell a story all their own. I remember even as  a child being absolutely fascinated by the old books my father owned. I’d pull them out of the book shelves and stare at them as if they’d open their mouths and start talking to me any minute. Needless to say, I couldn’t actually read most of them.

In fact, now that I think about it, even at the libraries it was the older books that drew me to them, as if they were somehow more exciting than their shiny, new counterparts with their glossy, embossed covers. I’d hold them and think of all the people who’d have read the book before me and what they’d thought of it. And of course, it pissed me off no extent when some well-intentioned people actually went ahead and scribbled what they’d thought of it on the covers. 😐 Vandals.

So, when I last made a mad dash to one of my bookstores of choice, it’s really no surprise that just as I was paying the bill some really old books stacked against the counter caught my attention. And then they were half price off. What can I say, the odds were stacked against my meager funds.

I’m still not sure why this was one of the books I picked up but it was possibly because there was something vaguely familiar about the title. Either way, I ended up buying Murder She Wrote: Hooray for Homicide, by all accounts a strange title but then the James Bond books also couldn’t have claimed any better. 

Based on an old TV series, the book was about a murder mystery writer and how she finds herself turned into a real life sleuth. Possibly because it was based on a TV series (does anybody remember the days that  was still done!) the book contained not one but two separate stories! In the first mystery Jessica, a 50 year-old widow (no Nancy Drew, this one) finds herself drawn into the middle of the murder of Stephen Earl, a cosmetics tycoon whose sudden disappearance from on board a yacht when sailing with his daughter raises a few questions. Many stand to gain from his death; too many perhaps.

The second one takes Jessica all the way to Hollywood when she finds out her bestselling book, The Corpse Danced at Midnight, is to be made into a movie. Except the way Jessica sees it, it’s not so much being made into a movie as it’s being murdered and mauled and she must do all she can to prevent this atrocity. But even as she wriggles a way into the studio to talk to the producer, he gets murdered and Jessica becomes a suspect!

A slightly quirky read, you don’t have to worry about the book being a heavy-duty whodunnit. With a blatant disregard for anything resembling police procedures, it’s very much like a home-baked murder. Nonetheless, it makes for an interesting as well as amusing read and is not a badly written book at all.

This one gets a 3 on 5. And I’m going to look for another Murder She Wrote the next time I visit the store! 🙂