The Dublin murder squad

I don't want to give the impression that my life outside of work is solely concerned with guitar effects pedals, so I thought that I would write a little about the books that I am currently reading. Over on the Reddit Cormoran Strike channel, some people have recommended the Dublin Murder Squad series of books, by Tana French, so I thought that I would try them.

I am currently about half way through the fifth book (out of six) so at least I know what I am writing about. As one might imagine, the books are concerned with murders committed in the Dublin area and the attempts of the police to solve them. As opposed to most detective series, there is no titular policeman. Instead, protagonist #2 from the first book becomes protagonist #1 of the second book; protagonist #2 of the second book becomes protagonist #1 of the third book; a character from the third book becomes the protagonist of the fourth book, and another, more minor, character from the third book becomes one of the protagonists of the fifth book. All of the books are written with a first person narrative, that is slightly off-putting at first until one discovers who the narrator is.

Titular detective series devote as much time to the detectives' private lives as they do to the murder mystery. In this series, it seems like even more time is devoted to the detectives' private lives, but as each book has a different detective, all this information is not carried over from previous books but instead has to be read (and written) and absorbed each time anew. Whilst this gives author Tana French bonus points, in my opinion it is somewhat overdone.

The first book was very good (if slightly long); the second book was very long and not very interesting - in fact, I'm not sure that I even finished it. The third book was so-so (the background material was more interesting than the murder story); the fourth was more about detecting, but again over-long. The fifth, so far, seems to have struck a good balance; in fact, there's much less background material.

Somewhat off-putting is the language; apart from a small amount of Dublin slang, there is also a tremendous amount of swearing. Judging by 'The Commitments', the swearing content was about right, but it's annoying to a polite person like myself.

Reading these books is fairly hard work and it's not particularly rewarding (at least I can read them, as opposed to some detective novels that I found unpalatable and not worth reading). I hope that rereading these will be more rewarding.

I mentioned fictional detective Cormoran Strike in the opening paragraph; I discovered yesterday that two of the televised books ('Lethal white' and 'Troubled blood') are to be broadcast again on tv here in the next few days. Apparently work has started on filming the next book in the series, 'The Ink Black Heart', a book that is generally considered to be inferior to 'Troubled blood'. This no doubt will present a huge technical challenge as a fair amount of the book is composed of discussion group chats, often three at a time. These chats make reading the book (especially on a Kindle) very hard. 

And talking of Kindles, I managed to lose the cover bag for mine a few weeks ago; this was made by a seamstress on the kibbutz who took some material, folded it over, sewed it up and used some velcro to close the bag. Not to worry: I ordered a kindle cover from Temu. This is like a mobile phone cover, where the device sits snugly in the back cover and a front cover protects it. Unfortunately, my kindle is relatively old and is slightly smaller than the cover that I ordered (which was the smallest on offer); a few pieces of double-sided adhesive tape solved that problem.

Writing about velcro and double-sided adhesive tape makes a fine introduction to my guitar pedalboard that arrived yesterday. There are plenty of videos on YouTube about putting together a pedalboard, but 99% of these are concerned with the pedals and only a few discuss how to attach the pedals to the pedalboard. Fortunately I found one of these and had an aha! moment, after which I succeeded in attaching the various devices that I already have to the board. Yesterday I ordered a tuner pedal, and finally a tremolo pedal, so I'll attach these when they come. I also redefined the presets on the multi-effects pedal to be more useful with approximately matched volumes.

The board comes in its own gig bag with a voluminous extra pocket. I was able to distribute all the bits and pieces that I carry around with me (manuscript paper, strings, cables, capos, laundry clips [for the paper], pens, etc) between pockets on the guitar gig bag and the pedalboard gig bag, so I don't need to carry around yet another bag.

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
337	27/02/2011	Michael Palin	TV series, Prague, Poland, Michael Palin
456	27/02/2012	More spooks	TV series, MI5
928	27/02/2016	Chicken breasts in tomato sauce	Cooking
1013	27/02/2017	What are the benefits of ERP enhancement?	ERP, DBA
1203	27/02/2019	Pneumonia again	Health
1476	27/02/2022	More musicians	Obituary, King Crimson
1587	27/02/2023	Bone conduction headphones/mp3 player	MP3, Headphones