Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2010

If something is perfect, why change it?

My husband and I were on Cape Cod on July 11, and I read in The Boston Globe that Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express would be shown on PBS that night.  Now, as far as I’m concerned, Ms. Christie was/is The Queen of Mysteries.  I know, I know, the Golden Age style is no longer in vogue.  Now we need serial killers (see my July 7 post), sexual perversions, and child abuse to make a best seller.  But no one, past or present, could toss those red herrings around like Dame Agatha.

Very excited to see a new version of this classic novel, I sat through an hour-long promo of David Suchet going for a ride on the Orient Express.  I’m guessing he’s a Method Actor and needed to experience the train before he “became” Hercule Poirot.  I must admit that I’ve never been the biggest Suchet fan, but then I’ve never seen a Poirot I thought was authentic.

Anyhow, at 9 p.m. I was ready to view this mystery classic.  And was I disappointed! I thought that Suchet was acting as if he had a hyperactivity problem.  His facial expressions, his gestures, were so unlike the refined, mannered Belgian detective as to be almost (almost) humorous.  I keep waiting for him to calm down, to remember the character he was playing, but no such luck.

Of course, I don’t know if this (mis)characterization of the great detective was the author’s fault or the director’s.  But either way it was wrong, wrong, wrong.  There wasn’t a bit of Christie’s character in this production.

My feeling is, if you’re going to change the character or plot of a novel when you bring it to film or television, perhaps you should simply invent a new character.  Leave the old one alone and come up with your own idea.

And that way you won’t even have to pay royalties!

Marilyn

Malaysia, here we come!  Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder is the debut novel featuring Singaporean police detective Inspector Singh.

So here’s my confession–I needed to look up Google Maps to find Singapore and Malaysia. And when I did, I was even more confused, so I needed to read the attached text to figure out the story of the Malay Peninsula.   The Dutch established trading posts there in the 17th century, the British later colonized it, the Japanese invaded it during World War II.   In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula formed the Federation of Malaya, and in 1957, after a decade of intense negotiations, it gained independence from Britain and renamed itself Malaysia.   In 1963 Singapore and two other states joined the Peninsular Malaysia Federation, but Singapore left in 1965 (or was expelled, depending on which source you believe) to become a separate nation, a city-state.

Be honest, did you know all that?  If so, you must have been paying more attention in Geography class than I was.  Well, maybe all that background isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy Inspector Singh Investigates, but it does help one understand some important aspects of the story.

The maverick inspector has been sent from Singapore to protect the rights of Chelsea Liew, a Singapore citizen who marred a Malaysian man twenty years ago and now is about to be tried for his murder.  The picture-perfect marriage of the beautiful model and the wealthy tycoon spiraled into an abusive relationship with adultery on the side. The birth of three sons did nothing to help Chelsea’s marriage to Alan Lee, and she now stands before the court accused of his death.

Before the murder came the divorce with its custody issues.  Popular opinion favored Chelsea, as Alan’s extra-marital affairs were well known.  It looked as if Chelsea had a good chance to gain custody of their children, even though she was not Muslim; although Malaysia is a strongly male-dominated culture and officially a Muslim state, there is freedom of religion.  However, when things begin to go badly for Alan Lee during the trial, his lawyer requests and is given a two-week recess.  When the trial resumes it is announced that Lee has converted to Islam and has unilaterally converted his three sons as well.  According to Islamic law, this conversion automatically gives him custody of the boys to raise them as Muslims.  Was the threat of losing custody of their sons enough of a motive for murder?

This is a very strong first novel.  The characters are well-defined, easy to remember.  And the insights into the Malaysian culture and the city of Kuala Lumpur are well done.  It’s a “foreign” country, even to neighboring Singaporeans.  Singapore is a tightly run country, famous for outlawing chewing gum in public and for caning people as punishment.  Malaysia, on the other hand, is looser, overcrowded, and ecologically unaware, or so it seems from the picture of its capital city.  The description of Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating one.   And Inspector Singh is a wonderful addition to the world of police detectives.

You can read more about Shamini Flint on her web site.

The mother-daughter team of P. J. Tracy has written another Monkeewrench novel about two winning teams: the computer geeks/hackers/geniuses at Monkeewrench and the Minneapolis detective team of Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth.  And the entertaining style of Patricia Lambrecht (mother) and Traci Lambrecht (daughter) combines to make this book hard to put down.

In Shoot to Thrill, it appears that the Web has spawned a new kind of evil, pre-posts of murders that are then carried out. There seems to be a Wisconsin connection, a strange thing in a state where nothing bad ever happens, or hardly ever.  But it all comes to light in nearby Minneapolis, the home of the Monkeewrench group and Magozzi and Rolseth.

The F.B.I., being legally unable to hack into sites that may be hiding these killers, sends its agent, John Smith, to Minneapolis to work with Monkeewrench to uncover the web sites that are posting the murders on YouTube for the whole world to watch.  Straight as an arrow, Smith is nearly at the Bureau’s mandatory age of retirement of 57 and is thinking back over his lackluster career.  He had dreams of heroic exploits that never came to pass, and his association with Monkeewrench may be the “slippery slope” that will make him look outside the box he has created for himself.

Magozzi, meanwhile, is still dealing with his unrequited love for Grace McBride, the founder of the Monkeewrench computer experts.  Grace, in turn, is unable to commit to any relationship due to her feelings of guilt over the deaths of close friends and associates for which she blames herself.

During the national search for the killers who are posting the murders on the Internet, the Minneapolis P.D. is also confronted with a series of possible bombs planted at various locations around the city. Is this the work of a terrorist group or simply some copycat teenagers out to disrupt the city as a joke?  F.B.I. profiler Chealsea Thomas thinks the latter but can’t be certain.

Even though the plot is a serious one, there’s a lot of humor in this series. There’s a lot of clever repartee between Magozzi and Rolseth, two typical cops who can’t let on how fond they are of each other.  The Monkeewrenches are oddball characters who have made a fortune with their video games and now can pick and choose what they want to do.

The authors have given each member an offbeat vibe:  Harley Davidson (yes!) owns the mansion where the group works and is a fabulous cook; Grace McBride also cooks but locks herself in her house with its barred windows and steel door; Annie Belinsky wears costumes rather than clothes; and Roadrunner (no first name given) lives in Lycra jogging outfits.

The Monkeewrench series is an enjoyable one, and this mother and daughter team have a lot on the ball.

You can read more about P. J. Tracy at her/their web site.

A friend recently sent me an e-mail about the current craze for international mysteries.  It seems that publishers are rushing all over the globe to find the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and they’re including the African continent in their search.  I don’t know if Bait will be among the next world-wide best sellers, but it’s certainly a fascinating, well-written thriller that looks deeply into a country not too well known to most American readers.

Kenya is a country that has been independent for decades, but it is a country that has been rife with tribal rivalries, riots, crime, and corruption in recent years. Enter Mombassa detective Daniel Jouma, perhaps the only honest cop in that city.  Enter from the other side of the stage ex-detective Jake Moore, who left England five years ago after a bullet wound and ended up in Mombassa running a charter fishing boat with a partner.  But now Moore’s business is in deep financial trouble, and his partner Harry is dealing with some very dangerous characters in order to keep afloat (pardon the pun).

The book opens with the death of another fishing boat captain, Dennis Bentley, and his young African assistant in a suspicious explosion that the police of the nearby city of Malindi are quick to call an accident.  What follows is another string of murders, all seemingly unconnected but which are, in fact, part of the underworld of Mombassa. When Bentley’s daughter Martha flies in from New York to see about her late father’s business and learn the details of his death, more murders and attempted murders follow.  There’s an unsavory cast of characters in Mombassa–an unctuous hotel owner, a former South African policeman kicked off the force for brutality in the post-apartheid days, a city crime boss who thinks he’s benevolent because instead of murdering one of the prostitutes he controls he merely cuts off one of her fingers–all of whom are involved in the city’s corrupt ways.  And then Martha’s boyfriend flies in from New York despite her wishes, bringing a new set of of complications.

The corruption in Mombassa is deep and wide and reaches throughout the country and abroad.   Where there’s money to be made, apparently, there’s no level too low to go to in order to get a piece of the action.  But as is made clear in the book, corruption is an equal opportunity employer.  Although we see the effect of crime in Kenya, the repercussions actually reach around the world to Europe and America.  No country’s hands are clean, it seems.

Brownlee’s characters are well-described and their motives are realistic. There are some clear lines between “good” and “bad” behavior and some fuzzy ones, as is true in life.  The author’s description makes the city and its people come alive, and the poverty that is almost everywhere makes the corruption easier to understand, if not to justify.  Two other books follow Jouma and Moore’s adventures in Mombassa, and I hope there will be more.

Jouma and Moore are an interesting pair, reminding me in some ways of a latter-day Kramer and Zondi by James McClure, an excellent series that takes place in pre-apartheid South Africa.  I hope Nick Brownlee will follow in McClure’s footsteps and give readers more insight into another African country.

You can read more about Nick Brownlee at his web site.

True to my promise in the April 22^nd post, I’m still refusing to post reviews of books I’ve read but haven’t enjoyed or thought worth recommending. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t think about those books and why I didn’t like them.  So now I’m going to vent a bit.  Okay, a lot.

I read three books in the last couple of weeks, all of which featured serial killers.  Honestly, I am really tired of serial killers. It’s so easy for an author to make a S.K. the villain.  You don’t need any motive, or at least any realistic motive, if your killer just keeps killing seemingly random people—sort of like the Energizer Bunny on steroids.

The author can blame everything on the killer’s childhood, which is what these three authors seemed to do, without actually explaining what it was in their childhoods that caused the man (the S.K. is almost always a man, almost always white, almost always in his 30s or 40s).  Actually, after I read these three books, I thought I could quit my day job and become a profiler for the FBI. Once the authorities have decided a S.K. is on the loose, they turn to S.K. 101 in their textbooks and come up with the above description, a one size fits all label.

So your parents made you eat all your veggies before you got dessert?  So you couldn’t have your own television/computer/car and all the other kids did?  So you got punished for coming home ten minutes past curfew?  That explains your compulsion to slice and dice women who are runners, men with beards, women over 50 with bleached hair the color of your late mother’s.  It’s easy, simplistic, and not at all convincing, at least to me.

I want a motive that’s realistic—love, hate, greed—all the old standbyes that make a person commit the unforgivable crime.

Do you feel the same?

Marilyn

I always wonder why an author chooses to stop writing a particular series.  Between 1987 and 1996 Walter Satterthwait published five books about Santa Fe private detectives Rita Mondragon and Joshua Croft, and then he stopped.  Did he tire of the pair?  Did he feel he had said all he needed/wanted to?   Although he has written other mysteries and some Westerns too, his official web page was lasted updated in 2007.  Has he stopped writing completely?  If you know the answer to any of these questions, please let me know.

Wall of Glass is the first of this series.  In it, Rita Mondragon, the owner of the Mondragon Agency, is wheel chair-bound, having been paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet that killed her husband two years earlier.  Joshua Croft is her assistant and “legs.”  He would obviously like to be more, but Rita is still dealing with the injury and is determined to keep their relationship on a professional, not physical, level.

The story revolves around a missing diamond necklace that had been stolen from the home of a Santa Fe builder and his wife a year earlier. The insurance company had paid the Leightons for their loss and considered the case closed although the necklace was never recovered.  Now Frank Biddle comes to the detective agency with a “hypothetical” story about possibly being able to recover a valuable piece of jewelry and needs Croft’s help in getting a finder’s fee from the insurance company.  Croft’s not interested in this bit of double dealing, but he plays along to find out more, and Biddle promises to contact him with more information.  But the next day the man is found dead.

The Leighton family, from whom the necklace was stolen, is dysfunctional at its core.  The husband and wife have an “open marriage,” the teenage son is drinking and doing coke while his parents are away with their “friends,” and their teenage daughter is cowed by her mother’s demeaning behavior toward her.  And Stacey Killebrew, a former convict and former friend of the murdered man, definitely doesn’t want Croft asking questions.

There’s a nice amount of description of the beautiful Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco, The City Different.  Satterthwait obviously loves this city, and he brings the clear blue skies and cinnamon colored hills to life.  Having been to both Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I can see why the state’s license plates read “The Land of Enchantment.”

There’s a fair amount of violence in Wall of Glass, but it’s realistic, not gratuitous.  There are three murders, two attempted murders, a near-fatal barroom brawl, and a car chase.  But Croft keeps his cool throughout, and the ending is believable and quite surprising.

You can read more about Walter Satterthwait at his web site.