Somebody Should Have Queried That

[akirlu]

I'm just starting into Jo Walton's Farthing, and my God she's got the tone nailed. Exactly the right feel for opening a country house murder mystery. Marvelous.

So it's a bit startling to find what remarkable gravel they have in England. It must be very different from the kind we use for gravel drives in Sweden. Apparently the English kind is so fine-grained and thinly spread it must resemble wet beach sand, since it not only takes *clear* imprints of tire marks, but actual footprints as well. Not only that, but it takes footprints so precisely that the size and the tread pattern of the shoe can be distinguished in it. That is some seriously amazing gravel, forsooth. The stuff in my grandparents drive, by contrast, being only biggish pea gravel, was so coarse that it tended to obliterate tire marks as they were made, leaving vague sweeping furrows of disturbed gravel, and took barely a dent from the passage of human feet. If you could distinguish footprints as footprints in it at all, it would still have been impossible to tell whether the unknown walker even wore shoes, let alone what size.

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Oops.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes. Well. Pity of it is, that gravel drive is shown so early that now I'm snagging on other details as well.

Would reluctant weekend visitors to mummy's country manor house really be toting along their own towels? Wedding gift towels at that?

And if someone is strangled to death, they tend to turn blue from anoxia, not red, except possibly wherever they get petechial microhaemorrhages, which wouldn't tend to make the person look ruddy-complected so much as breaking out in red spots, if I understand it right. And after death blood tends to pool in the lowest part of the corpse, which wouldn't have been the face, in this instance. Moreover, a Scotland Yard inspector who specialises in murder investigations would know that, rather than saying the red-faced corpse was "Strangled, obviously."

It's just annoying because, in general, the pacing and writing are so very fine, it just mars the effect. Poot.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Decomposed granite?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Possibly, if there's a divergence in usage. Certainly I wouldn't call it "gravel."

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

What does Jo say about these things?

(In my ideolect, Poot! is good and Pook! is bad ... it's Dutch for foot, I think? :-)

And...

[seawasp]

... even if some people WOULD, they shouldn't take it for granite that others will.