Okay, first of all, Hastings is an *idiot*. I don’t think I quite realized that in the other books I’ve read with him in them. He’s supposedly modeled after Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories, an audience surrogate character, but Watson gets an unfair rap about his bumbling—a side effect of his characterization on film rather than evidence in the canon—whereas Hastings is genuinely a boob, and one that doesn’t realize the extent of his boobitude. In this one, not only does he get everything […]