Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for August, 2010

One of the first mystery authors I read was Rex Stout.  I was captivated immediately by his incredible creations–Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  The former was a transplanted Montenegrin, the latter a transplanted Ohioan, but they became the quintessential New Yorkers.  Ah, if only the walls of Wolfe’s Manhattan brownstone could talk!

Although Rex Stout wrote other mysteries, it is the Wolfe series that made him famous and sealed him into my Mystery Hall of Fame.

More than 30 years ago I took a course on mysteries given by John McAleer, Professor of English at Boston College.  He had just written the biography of Rex Stout, and the thought of being in a room with someone who had actually met the author was an incredible experience for me.  I felt as if Stout might walk into our classroom at any moment.  He didn’t, but Professor McAleer made him real for me and everyone else in the class.

He told us that Stout wrote four pages every day and never made any corrections to his writing.  He thought it all out in his head beforehand and simply put it down on paper.  I still find that amazing.

I’ve seen a couple of old Nero Wolfe movies and the television series with the late Maury Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie.  Fine actors they may be, but I could never get into the series.  The same holds true for the very brief series of Wolfe mysteries with William Conrad as Wolfe and Lee Horsley as Archie; it was a non-starter for me.   I had such a strong feeling for what Wolfe and Archie (that’s how I think of them; last name for Nero Wolfe, first name for Archie Goodwin) would look like and talk like, neither series rang true.  The script writers couldn’t match Stout’s prose, and Wolfe and Archie without Stout just didn’t work.

But Wolfe and Archie were not the only fabulous characters that Stout invented.  Anyone familiar with this series knows Fritz Brenner, the chef who cooks the incredible meals that Wolfe and Archie eat; Inspector Cramer, the always exasperated police detective who can never get the best of Wolfe; Lily Rowan, the wealthy society “girl” and Archie’s love interest; and Saul Panzer, a private eye second only to Archie in his abilities.  And who could forget the master criminal, Arnold Zeck?  He was the only man ever to come close to beating Wolfe.

There have been adaptations of Nero Wolfe mysteries in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  I can only imagine the liberties the writers of those scripts took with Stout’s words, if the American writers, obviously more familiar with U.S. slang and New York City, couldn’t get it right.  Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin need the words of Rex Stout, and no one else, to truly be who they are.  No adaptations or abridgments work.

So the bottom line is, if you want to visit this first-class detective series, you need to read the books.   Among my favorites are The Golden Spiders, Fer-de-Lance, A Family Affair, Too Many Cooks, and The Doorbell Rang.

You can read more about Rex Stout at the Wolfe Pack web site.

Among Thieves is my third David Hosp mystery this year, which certainly proves his books are great reads.

Scott Finn is the protagonist in this series.  In the first book, Dark Harbor, Finn is an associate in a huge law firm in Boston, working practically 24/7 in his bid to become a partner.  In Among Thieves, the fourth in the series, he’s a successful attorney in private practice with a recent law school graduate, Lissa Krantz, and a former police detective, Tom Kozlowski, on his payroll.

Finn has an interesting background.  An orphan, he was in the foster care system growing up, and he ran with a criminal crowd in Southie, the Irish section of Boston.  That’s the lead-in to Among Thieves, in which a man Finn knows from childhood contacts him from jail to represent him.  Although Devon Malley has served time in prison for robbery, he’s never been a killer or a top man in the mob, and Finn takes the case.

In doing so, he also takes on Devon’s teenage daughter Sally who was dropped on Devon’s doorstep a year ago by her drug-addicted mother.  While Finn may be ready to deal with the robbery charges against Devon, he’s not quite sure about the child care.  But, having gone through the foster care system himself, he’s determined to keep Sally out of it.

The background of the story is Devon’s involvement with Whitey Bulger, former boss of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang.  Bulger, who in real life has been on the run for more than 15 years, was a major crime figure in Boston and was protected by FBI agents in that city without the knowledge of the Boston police department or the Massachusetts state police.  He is still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list,  charged with 19 murders as well as various other crimes.

Again, in real life, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed in 1990, with 13 works of art stolen; they have never been recovered.  So what’s the connection between a recent spate of murders in the city (seven in number), a small-time thief in Boston, and a murderer from Ireland who has never given up the cause of the IRA?

Hosp’s numerous characters are real and vibrant.  In Among Thieves, the offbeat romance of Finn’s staff members/friends, Lissa and Tom, continues and deepens.  Devon Malley is shown as a man out of his depth, always looking for the big score but doomed to a life of financially unrewarding crime, who finally has one good thing in his life, his newly-discovered daughter.  And Sally Malley (she says her mother always had an unusual sense of humor) is a strong girl who has learned the hard way that no one can be relied on or trusted.

Hosp’s sense of place is excellent too.  He knows his way around Boston, much as Robert B. Parker did, but his novels are grittier and Finn is a lawyer, not a private eye like Spencer.  Finn would rather be writing briefs and appearing in court than dealing with a brutal murderer, but he has taken a stand to defend Devon and does it.   Among Thieves is a strong novel in an excellent series.

You can read more about David Hosp at his web site.

I must stop reading mysteries about foreign places–my “must visit” list is getting way too long.  Now I’ve added Florence, Italy to it.

If you like the Inspector Brunetti series by Donna Leon, you’ll definitely enjoy The Drowning River.   Christobel Kent has created Sandro Cellini, a middle-aged former police detective, soft–spoken and much in love with his wife, a man with a great deal of humanity. Perhaps too much, as it was his humanity that caused his forced resignation from the Florence police.

After a child was kidnapped and found murdered, Sandro Cellini kept the child’s father informed about the suspect’s life, the suspect against whom there was not enough evidence to bring charges although the police knew he had killed the child.  Then, years later, the suspect was found murdered, and the breach of trust that Cellini had committed came to light.  He was allowed to resign so as to not blacken the reputation of the police force.  Unhappy and guilt-ridden, Cellini is at loose ends until his wife Luisa tells him his skills should be put to use as a private investigator.

Four days after he opens his office, a woman walks in and tells her story.  Her husband was found dead in the river, and the police believe it was a suicide.  Lucia Gentileschi doesn’t.  Her husband was eighty-one, considerably older than she, and had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, but she is sure he wouldn’t have killed himself.  “Why,” asks Cellini, “are you so sure?”  Her answer is simple.  “He never would have left me behind.” But, of course, although they were married for more than forty years, she doesn’t know everything about him.

At the same time, Cellini’s wife brings him a case of a missing English girl, Ronnie Hutton, who has disappeared from her Florence apartment and the art school where she was a student.   The owner of the apartment the girl and her roommate were renting told Luisa Cellini about her disappearance, how the girl’s mother was in Dubai and couldn’t leave, and could Luisa’s husband look into the matter?  Sandro Cellini doesn’t want to, but when he sees a photo of the missing girl in the newspaper he realizes that he had actually seen her in person, from his office window, early on the day she disappeared.  So he’s already involved and has no choice but to get more involved.  And then the two cases intersect.

There are several subplots going on as well.  Luisa Cellini has found a lump on her breast, and there’s the obvious dread of what the biopsy will bring.  And Ronnie Hutton’s roommate feels the police are getting nowhere and that she should become a small part of the investigation.

There’s an amazing sense of place in The Drowning River.  The author takes you street by street, piazza by piazza, until the reader feels that she’s actually walking through the city.  That apparently is due to the fact that English Ms. Kent has spent quite a bit of time in Florence, speaks Italian, and obviously loves the city.  The novel is slow-paced, the story going back and forth between the man who drowned and the girl who disappeared.

This is definitely not your typical private eye mystery, with guns and violence, but a thoughtful look into a city and its people, both natives and visitors.

Unfortunately, Christobel Kent doesn’t have her own web site, but you can read more about her at International Noir.

In a major departure from his Inspector Kurt Wallender series, Henning Mankell takes us to four continents in this thriller–Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.  So skillfully does he write, it seems as if Mankell has actually been to all of the above places at the times the events he’s writing about occur, although that’s obviously impossible; the first Chinese segment and the North American segment take place three quarters of a century before Mankell was born.

The Man from Beijing begins with the massacre of eighteen elderly people and one child in a tiny village in Sweden.  A photographer is the first person to happen on the scene.  Frightened and stunned he drives off and crashes his car, but before he dies he manages to impart the news of the killings.  The police arrive in the village, of course, and they and everyone in the country are appalled and bewildered by the carnage. Who and why are the questions on everyone’s lips.

Birgitta Roslin is a judge in a city far from Hesjovallen where the killings took place.  Although she, like everyone else, is horrified when she hears about the murders, she would seem to have no personal ties to the village.  But the next day, when she reads the names of the victims, she is reminded that her late mother had lived in Hesjovallen and realizes that two of the people killed were her mother’s foster parents.  She contacts the police and makes a visit to the town, scarcely aware of why she is doing so.

Once there, Roslin gets a cool reception from the local police who are overwhelmed investigating the biggest bloodbath in modern Sweden. At night in a nearby hotel, unable to sleep, Roslin breaks into the cottage where her mother lived and takes a diary from one of the drawers.  The diary was written by a man she assumes to be a relative of the Andren family who took her mother in.  “JA” had emigrated to the United States from Sweden in the 1860s and had become a foreman for one of the railroad companies engaged in building the tracks for the trains that crossed the continent.  His diary shows JA to be a tough, brutal overseer, bigoted against the freed slaves, American Indians, Irish immigrants, and Chinese indentured servants who are laying the tracks.  And it’s the Chinese/Swedish connection that forms the plot of The Man from Beijing.

In each section of the book, whether it takes place in Sweden, the United States, China, or Mozambique, Mankell makes the reader feel what it’s like to be there. It takes a while for the connections between these various points to appear, and I must confess that not everything is made clear.

I do have some “nitpicking” with this novel.  The reader can understand the motive for the crimes, but I didn’t find the motive as convincing as I would have liked.  I also felt that Birgitta Roslin was a bit too naive, too passive for a woman with her life experiences.  SPOILER ALERT: And I thought the way her life was saved was not believable.

These caveats aside, The Man from Beijing is a page-turner in the best sense.  It has a terrific plot, believable characters, and a sense that many of the political beliefs that Roslin and other characters have come straight from Mankell’s heart.  Like every other book by this author, it’s a mystery worthy of your time.

You can read more about Henning Mankell at his web site.

“…The (coal) seam was no bigger than thirty inches and often narrowed to twenty-six. Miners here spent their working lives in a space no taller than a coffee table…its operators all lay prone.  Miners had to bring straws with their lunches because there was rarely enough room to tilt a Coke can over their heads.”

The cliche life imitates art is unfortunately too true, for this novel’s story closely parallels the tragedy in a West Virginia coal mine earlier this year.

This first novel by Gardiner Harris has the very dysfunctional Murphy family at its center.  They are third generation miners in Perry County, Kentucky.  Will Murphy is the novel’s protagonist, for hero is too positive a word to describe him.  Will’s father and uncle started mining in a small way, and after the oil crisis in the 1970s the demand for coal increased and so did the family fortunes.  Then Will’s father forced Will’s uncle Elliott out, creating a family rift that never healed.

Years ago Will was responsible for causing an explosion in the family mine; as a result his younger brother died, and Will suffered severe burns over much of his body.  Will has never forgiven himself, so partly to make amends he gave up mining and is now an inspector for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.  Just before the book opens Will’s father died, and the reading of his will gives complete control of the Blue Gem mine to Will’s brother Paul.  As the novel begins, there is an explosion in the Blue Gem in which nine miners drown; the investigation has been given to Will.  Is the official thinking that he won’t find fault with his brother’s mine?

Mining is an incestuous business, with miners, mine owners, and mine inspectors all members of the same families.  The miners are dependent on the mine being open and operating, the owners are dependent on the slack enforcement of safety standards by MSHA to ensure high profits, and the inspectors all have relatives who work or own the mines.  It’s not a good recipe for honest inspections and rigid adherence to safety regulations.

Will is very much a flawed man.  He’s tormented by the accident he caused, and everything he has done since then has been impacted by that event.  His relationship with his mother is cool, his relationship with Paul almost non-existent, his relationships with his superiors in MSHA difficult because they want to close the case, his relationship with his wife and teenage daughter problematic because his wife has moved out of their home so their daughter can attend a different high school and have the chance to win a basketball scholarship.

There’s so much going on that several times Will is ready to give up the investigation, but each time something comes up to cause him to try to make sense of why the miners were cutting in an old mine area which shouldn’t have contained water but did.

Harris uses his background as an investigative reporter in coal mining Kentucky to bring to life a community where there’s nothing else but mines, no other way to earn a living.  It’s all most people in the area know, and their lives have been so restricted for generations that it’s almost impossible for them to think about leaving and finding another way of life.  Will Murphy has managed to leave the mine, but the mine hasn’t left him.

You can read more about Gardiner Harris at this web site.

There is only one Queen of Crime, and Agatha Christie is her name.

From The Mysterious Affairs at Styles (1920) to Sleeping Murder (1976), she wrote.  Think of it, more than fifty years of writing.  Not only novels but plays, short stories, her biography, romances under the name Mary Westacott.  She began when there were probably more horses than cars in England and you needed an operator to make a telephone call and finished when men had stepped onto the moon and satellites spun around the earth.

Not every book she wrote was great.  Actually, on the advice of a friend I’ve never read Nemesis, because she told me it was so bad I’d never want to read another Christie afterward.  And I never liked Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple who seemed outdated to me even after Mrs. Christie tried to modernize them in the 1970s.

But, when she was good she was great.  If I had to choose one mystery to take along on the proverbial desert island, there’d be no hesitation…And Then There Were None.  I must have read that novel at least five times, and each time I’m amazed by it.  How did she do it, I’d ask myself.  The identity of the murderer is right there, it’s clear from the first chapter, and yet the reader is totally surprised at the end.  You may think that a mystery is a “beach read,” to use the popular phrase, but that’s not true for a really great one.  You need to read every word if you want to catch the villain.  And in Mrs. Christie’s books, to coin a metaphor, the floors are slippery with red herrings…you need to watch your step or you’ll fall into the trap she sets for you.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot was her masterpiece.  Ms. Jane Marple, the elderly lady from St. Mary Mead, was featured in a number of outstanding books (At Bertram’s Hotel, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Murder at the Vicarage), but it is Hercule Poirot who brought the author her greatest fame.  In 1975, the year before her death, Mrs. Christie released Curtain, which told the story of Poirot’s last case and his death.  I remember reading his obituary in The New York Times that day, the first (and maybe to this day still the only) time the death of a fictional character was headlined in that newspaper.

If you haven’t already read them, or even if you have, please do yourself a favor and (re)read the following:  And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and The ABC Murders, just to (re)discover what outstanding storytelling is.

You can read more about Agatha Christie at her web site.

I haven’t met a tough-talking British female private eye in a long time, but now Charlie Fox is here. Second Shot is the second book in a series featuring a former member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, a martial arts expert and crack shot.  But Charlie was court-martialed out of the corps in a bogus trial, and now she’s working as a private investigator in a small London firm.

There’s quite a backstory to Charlie, formally known as Charlotte, but it’s pretty much only hinted at here.  The reader finds out that she comes from a well-to-do English family with cold, unloving parents; what we don’t know is why this semi-estrangement has taken place.  Her father, an internationally known orthopedic surgeon, is very upset with her career choices, both past and present; her mother’s reasons aren’t explained at all.  So all we know is that Charlie is pretty much alone in the world, except for her professional and personal relationship with her boss, Sean Meyer.

Meyer’s agency is approached when Simone Kerse wins a thirteen million pound lottery in England. She plans to use part of that money to travel to America to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child.  Now Simone is a single mother with her own child, but the child’s father has been stalking her, trying to persuade her not to try to find the man who ran out on Simone and her mother more than twenty years ago.  Simone doesn’t want Charlie’s interference or protection, but when the child’s father bursts into a restaurant where Simone, her daughter, and the two investigators are having lunch and seemingly tries to grab the child, she reluctantly agrees to let Charlie accompany her and her daughter to Boston while she searches.

The opening chapter of the book has Charlie in a ditch, hiding from a gun-wielding Simone who is shot dead before she can shoot Charlie. The book then flashes back to how the detective was hired, how Simone’s father was located, and how money can’t buy happiness, even thirteen million pounds of money.

To the author’s credit, Second Shot is a definite page-turner.  Charlie is an interesting heroine who comes with lots and lots of baggage.  I would have enjoyed the book more if some of that baggage had been unpacked instead of merely being hinted about, to flesh out Charlie’s character.  There’s a lot of talk about Charlie not wanting to take the assignment as it means going to America where she obviously had had a terrible experience some time before, but we’re never told what it is.  Is that information in First Drop, the beginning of the series, or is it a teaser that will only be explained later?  I think it’s an important enough piece of information about the heroine to warrant an explanation.

And Zoe Sharp doesn’t seem to have a strong handle on her characters’ emotions and personalities–they changed from chapter to chapter, not always convincingly.  That said, there were some things that totally surprised me.  There was one that I was sure I had figured out, but I was wrong (yes, sometimes that happens).

I’d like to see more of Charlie Fox.  She’s an interesting woman, and the series has a lot going for it.  It needs a bit of tweaking in terms of characters, but Ms. Sharp is definitely on the right track.

You can read more about Zoe Sharp at her web site.